Air Quality in Omaha, Nebraska — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Omaha — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 19 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Omaha, Nebraska is AQI 19 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 16 to 51. 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 Omaha: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very high 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 Omaha and Bellevue, Papillion, La Vista, Council Bluffs. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Omaha
The sensors Canairy reads in Omaha are 35 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.9 mi SSW | 19 | Good |
| 3.4 mi SW | 18 | Good |
| 4.4 mi SSW | 51 | Moderate |
| 6.1 mi E | 19 | Good |
| 6.9 mi WSW | 16 | Good |
Nebraska has no nonattainment area anywhere in the state. Omaha does not appear in the EPA's Green Book list for the 2015 ozone standard, and on paper that makes it one of the cleaner big cities in the middle of the country. What changed recently is the trend rather than the designation. The American Lung Association's 2025 State of the Air moved the Omaha metro from 79th to 29th worst in the nation for ozone pollution, with 8.2 unhealthy ozone days a year against 1.7 in the previous report, and Douglas County's ozone grade fell from a B to an F. Short-term particle pollution also worsened, from 60th to 104th worst, though the county held a C. Sara Prem of the American Lung Association put it simply, saying too many people in the Omaha metro area are living with unhealthy levels of ozone and particle pollution.
What Canairy does for Omaha
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Omaha: open the windows, or keep them shut.
Smoke alerts
A push or text the moment the air crosses your threshold — and again when it clears.
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
Home, work, the kids' school — across Omaha or across the country, on one screen.
The smoke advisories now come from the state, and they name Omaha first
On 31 July 2025 the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment issued a smoke advisory running through 5 p.m. the following day, naming Omaha, Lincoln, Fremont and Grand Island as the places likely to be affected. The forecast range was Moderate to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, and the cause was wildfires in Canada. The guidance was the standard particle-pollution guidance: at Moderate, anyone unusually sensitive should consider shortening outdoor activities and reducing their intensity; at Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, people with heart or lung disease, older adults, children, pregnant women and outdoor workers should cut prolonged or heavy exertion and avoid intense outdoor activity altogether.
That is the shape of Omaha's worst air, and it is entirely imported. The particle spikes come from fires burning hundreds or thousands of miles north, and whether a given plume settles over the Missouri valley or slides past depends on the day's wind and how much of the smoke stays aloft. It is the kind of event where a citywide forecast issued the day before is genuinely less useful than a sensor two streets from your house reading the air as it is.
Ozone is measured here by the county, not the state
Douglas County runs its own ambient air monitoring programme rather than leaving it to the state, which is unusual for a metro this size. The county's NCore station on the health department campus carries a full instrument set: carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, filter-based PM2.5, continuous PM2.5 and continuous PM10. Ozone in Douglas County is measured at a single continuous monitor, located at that NCore site, and the county operates three continuous particulate monitors.
One ozone monitor for a metro of this size is worth knowing about when you read a headline number. Ozone forms in the air over several hours as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds react in sunlight, so it does not sit still and it does not peak evenly across a city. Neither does smoke. A regulatory monitor is designed to characterise a region for compliance purposes, which is a different job from telling you what the air is doing at your kid's school on a July afternoon.
The lead under east Omaha is a soil story, not something a sensor reads
The Omaha Lead Site is one of the largest residential Superfund sites in the country. It was added to the National Priorities List on 30 April 2003 and covers roughly 8,840 acres across the eastern part of the city, centred on the former ASARCO lead refinery at 500 Douglas Street, on the west bank of the Missouri River downtown. ASARCO refined lead there from the early 1870s until 1996, and during those decades lead and other heavy metals went up the stacks, blew downwind and settled into the soil. Gould, Inc. ran a secondary lead smelter recycling batteries in the area until it closed in 1982. EPA investigations found elevated lead in soil as far as 2.5 miles from the ASARCO site. Around 65,615 residents live inside the identified contamination area, along with twenty Omaha Public Schools enrolling 11,725 students. The cleanup criterion for removing residential soil was 400 milligrams of lead per kilogram.
Here is the part worth being clear about. The refinery stopped emitting in 1996. What remains is in the ground, not in the air, and it reaches people through soil and dust rather than through a plume you could measure today. Nothing on this page tracks lead. PurpleAir sensors measure fine particulate matter, which is a different thing entirely. If you live in east Omaha and want to know about lead in your yard, that is a soil test and a conversation with the city's lead hazard programme, not an air quality reading.
Omaha air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Omaha right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Omaha, Nebraska is AQI 19 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Omaha today?
Because a fire somewhere far away is sending it here. Nothing near Omaha burns at that scale, but Canadian wildfire smoke reaches eastern Nebraska regularly in summer. On 31 July 2025 the state health department and the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment issued a smoke advisory naming Omaha, Lincoln, Fremont and Grand Island, forecasting anywhere from Moderate to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. Smoke is fine particulate matter, which is exactly what the sensors on this page measure, so a real smoke day shows up here as a clear rise rather than something you have to infer.
Does the Omaha Lead Superfund site show up in the air quality reading?
No. The Omaha Lead Site covers about 8,840 acres of east Omaha and was listed on the National Priorities List in 2003, but the contamination is lead deposited in soil by air emissions from the ASARCO refinery that operated at 500 Douglas Street until 1996. The stacks stopped almost thirty years ago. What is left is a soil exposure issue, addressed by testing yards and replacing contaminated soil above 400 milligrams per kilogram, and PurpleAir sensors do not measure lead at all. They measure fine particulate matter, so a clean reading on this page says nothing either way about soil lead.
Is Omaha's air actually getting worse?
The most recent evidence says the ozone side got worse, at least in the years covered by the 2025 State of the Air report. The metro fell from 79th to 29th worst nationally for ozone, unhealthy ozone days rose from 1.7 to 8.2 a year, and Douglas County's grade went from B to F. Short-term particle pollution slipped too. Set against that, Nebraska still has no federal nonattainment area for any pollutant, so Omaha is starting from a genuinely good baseline. The worsening is real and worth watching, but it is a change in how many summer afternoons go orange, not a city with year-round bad air.
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 Omaha, 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 Omaha
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