Air Quality in Olympia, Washington — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Olympia — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 37 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Olympia, Washington is AQI 37 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 6.7 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 20 to 44. Canairy's verdict: Breathe easy.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is below the World Health Organization's 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. The WHO figure is a daily average and this is a live reading, so read it as a sense of magnitude rather than a formal exceedance — a brief spike and a bad day are not the same thing. More on the WHO guidelines
Pollen today in Olympia: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate level, from Google's pollen forecast. Canairy shows the tree, grass and weed forecast beside the air reading on every plan, including the free one.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Olympia and Lacey, Tumwater, Yelm, Shelton. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Olympia
The sensors Canairy reads in Olympia agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 24-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.5 mi WNW | 37 | Good |
| 3.8 mi E | 36 | Good |
| 4.1 mi NW | 20 | Good |
| 6.2 mi SSE | 39 | Good |
| 7.1 mi NW | 44 | Good |
Olympia sits at the very bottom of Puget Sound, on Budd Inlet where the Deschutes River comes in, and it gets colder and stiller than places an hour up the road. The city averages about 157 frost-free growing days a year, nearly a hundred fewer than Seattle. Those cold, calm nights are the whole story of Olympia's air. The Olympic Region Clean Air Agency ran a year of monitoring here between October 2015 and January 2017 and found the same shape every winter day: fine particles climb in the evening, stay high overnight and through the early morning, then fall away by lunchtime. Wood smoke accounts for 50 to 65 percent of the evening and nighttime particles in winter, and only about 20 percent between noon and 4 PM.
What Canairy does for Olympia
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Olympia: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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A heads-up before it's bad
Trend alerts catch the air turning, so you can close up the house before the smoke settles in.
Every place you care about
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What the air in Olympia is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 22 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Tomorrow | 22 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Sunday | 22 | Good | PM2.5 |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
A different agency watches Olympia's air than Seattle's
The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency covers King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties, and it stops before it gets here. Thurston County is regulated by the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency, which covers Clallam, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, Mason, Pacific and Thurston counties and has its head office on Limited Lane NW in west Olympia. That means burn bans, monitoring and stove programs in Olympia are announced separately from the Seattle-area ones, and the rules are not identical.
ORCAA's burn ban stages are written around outdoor fires. Under a Stage 1 ban no outdoor burning is allowed anywhere in the region, including recreational fires, even in areas where outdoor burning is normally permitted. Stage 2 bans outdoor fires of any kind, backyard fire kettles, chimineas and fire pits included. The stove side is different too: ORCAA pays Thurston County residents who burn at least a cord of wood a year $750 to switch an old stove to natural gas or propane, $1,000 to switch to electric or a pellet stove, and $2,200 toward an electric heat pump, or $500 simply to recycle an old stove and not replace it.
East Olympia and west Olympia do not read the same
The saturation study put four monitors around the county at once: one at Mountain View Elementary in Lacey, which has been the permanent Thurston County monitoring site since 1985; one at Olympia Fire Station 3 on Boulevard Road SE in east Olympia, in a residential neighborhood; one at the ORCAA offices in west Olympia, surrounded by apartments and offices; and one at Rochester Middle School in the rural south of the county. Air quality was good more than 90 percent of the time at all four. But the differences between them were large enough to matter.
In winter, roughly 10 to 15 percent of days reached Moderate or Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups at Lacey, east Olympia and Rochester. At the west Olympia site fewer than 2 percent of winter days were even Moderate and none reached Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups; it was good more than 99 percent of the year. The agency's explanation is simple and very local: the east Olympia and Lacey monitors sit in single-family neighborhoods full of wood stoves and fireplaces, and the west Olympia one sits in a commercial and apartment district where hardly anyone burns wood. Strong temperature inversions often set in after dark and hold through morning, which is what turns an ordinary evening of wood burning into a Moderate reading. By midday the inversion weakens or lifts and winter air is about as clean as an average summer day.
The burn permits that stop at the city line
Thurston County issues about three thousand outdoor burn permits a year, and not one of them is valid inside the Olympia, Lacey or Tumwater city limits or urban growth area. That line shows up in the data. The rural Rochester monitor recorded 11 Moderate days and 3 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups days during a stretch when the Lacey reference monitor read Good, and the wind direction at Rochester pointed the higher readings back toward farmland to the west and southwest rather than toward the houses. ORCAA's read is that outdoor burning, not wood stoves, drives the peaks out there.
Inside the cities the source flips. With open burning banned, ORCAA found that stoves and fireplaces in Olympia and Lacey produce about the same particle concentrations as open burning does in the rural communities. It has been that way for a long time. In August 1987 the Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater area was declared a Group 1 non-attainment area for PM10 after repeated exceedances of the daily federal standard, and it was new wood stove and outdoor burning rules that brought it back into compliance. Thurston County's population has grown by roughly a third since the mid-1990s and the air has still improved.
Olympia air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Olympia right now?
As of September 11, 2026 at 5:10 AM PDT, the air quality in Olympia, Washington is AQI 37 — Good — with PM2.5 at 6.7 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Olympia today?
From late fall through winter it is almost always residential wood burning. ORCAA's monitoring found residential wood heating is the dominant source of fine particles in Thurston County during the cold months, peaking in the evening and overnight when people are home with the stove going and a temperature inversion is holding the smoke near the ground. In July, August and September it is more likely to be wildfire smoke carried in from British Columbia, eastern Washington, Oregon or California. Wildfires within ORCAA's own counties are rare, remote and small, so smoke here is usually something that arrived rather than something burning nearby.
Is Olympia's air actually bad in winter?
Not usually, and it is much better than it was. Across a full year of monitoring at four sites, air quality in Thurston County was good more than 90 percent of the time. The problem is concentrated: it is the evening and overnight hours between roughly November and February, on the cold, still nights when an inversion sets in. Winter midday air is about as clean as an average summer day. That narrow window is exactly what an alert is good for, because it comes and goes within a few hours.
What makes Olympia's air worse in summer?
Not much, most years. Across the saturation study, summertime PM2.5 stayed below 7.5 micrograms per cubic meter at all four Thurston County sites more than 98 percent of the time, with no meaningful daily pattern. What summer pollution there is comes from a mix of exhaust off Interstate 5, local industry and wind-blown dust. The exception is transported wildfire smoke in July, August and September, which ORCAA says has worsened summer air in the region since the study finished.
What the AQI numbers mean
| AQI | Category | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 0–50 | Good | Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity. |
| 51–100 | Moderate | Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside. |
| 101–150 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | Kids, elderly, and respiratory conditions stay closer to home. |
| 151–200 | Unhealthy | Skip outdoor exercise. Close windows. |
| 201–300 | Very Unhealthy | Limit time outside. N95 if you must go. |
| 301+ | Hazardous | Health emergency. Stay inside, run filtration if you have it. |
Canairy lets you tighten these bands if you’re more sensitive than the EPA default, so an alert can fire before the official category changes. How to read the Air Quality Index
Where these readings come from
The AQI at the top of this page is the median of the 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Olympia, with outliers set aside so that one sensor brought indoors — or parked beside a barbecue — cannot set the number for a whole city. Every sensor behind it is listed above with its distance and bearing from the city center. There is no black box here.
In the app, a place you save resolves the same way first. When no neighborhood sensor is reporting it falls back to the nearest EPA AirNow monitor, and anything modeled rather than measured is labelled a regional estimate rather than passed off as a sensor reading. How low-cost sensors compare to regulatory monitors
About Canairy
Canairy is free to download. The free plan covers one saved place with live readings, a plain-English verdict, and push alerts when the air crosses a threshold you choose. Paid plans add more places, faster refreshes, and SMS alerts. It is built by two parents in Sonoma County, California, who got tired of guessing whether it was safe to send the kids outside. Why we built it
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Air quality near Olympia
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