Air Quality in Overland Park, Kansas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Overland Park — with free alerts when ozone season turns the air unhealthy.
AQI 16 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Overland Park, Kansas is AQI 16 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 2.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 12 to 19. 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 Overland Park: 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 Overland Park and Leawood, Olathe, Lenexa, Shawnee. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Overland Park
The sensors Canairy reads in Overland Park agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 7-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.8 mi SSW | 19 | Good |
| 7.0 mi NNE | 15 | Good |
| 9.4 mi NNE | 12 | Good |
| 10.4 mi SE | 17 | Good |
Overland Park's air is clean for most of the year — the flat Kansas plains don't trap pollution the way a mountain valley does, and winter here is usually just cold and clear. The real story is ozone season: every year from March through October, the Mid-America Regional Council runs a daily SkyCast forecast for the whole Kansas City region, because hot, humid afternoons combined with heavy interstate traffic regularly push ground-level ozone into Ozone Alert Day territory.
What Canairy does for Overland Park
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Overland Park: 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 Overland Park or across the country, on one screen.
Ozone Alert Days are the real forecast to watch
Every year from March 1 through October 31, the Mid-America Regional Council issues a daily SkyCast ozone forecast for the Kansas City region, color-coded green through red, and Johnson County government keeps its own Ozone Alert Days page because the underlying chemistry is straightforward: gasoline vapors and vehicle exhaust react with heat and strong summer sun to form ground-level ozone. Overland Park sits right at the junction of the I-435 beltway and US-69, two of the busiest commuter corridors in the metro, which keeps the raw ingredients for ozone flowing all summer.
On an orange or red SkyCast day, Johnson County's own advice is to reschedule strenuous outdoor activity to before 11 a.m. or after 8 p.m., combine errands to cut down on driving, and wait until dusk to refuel a car, since gasoline vapors are part of the problem. Lawn and garden equipment alone is estimated to account for about 9 percent of the region's ozone-forming emissions, which is why alert-day guidance specifically calls out mowing. The American Lung Association's 2025 State of the Air report ranked the Kansas City metro 34th worst in the country for ozone — a sign this is a recurring seasonal pattern, not a rare event.
A commuter suburb built on two highways
Overland Park grew up around the interchange of Interstate 435, the Kansas City area's beltway, and U.S. Route 69, and that road network is still central to daily life here — I-435 and U.S. Route 50 also run concurrently east-west through the middle of the city. It's also one of the metro's biggest job centers: T-Mobile inherited Sprint's old corporate campus and remains the city's largest single employer, with roughly 6,300 workers, alongside engineering firm Black & Veatch and the Overland Park Xchange, the third-largest office building in the Kansas City metro.
That combination — heavy commuter traffic funneling through a couple of highway corridors, plus a large daytime office population, inside a metro that already trends toward the higher end of national ozone rankings — is exactly the mix that keeps ozone-forming emissions elevated through the summer half of the year. It's part of why the air on a hot July rush hour can read noticeably worse than the same spot at 6 a.m., even on a day that never reaches an official Alert Day.
The one real exception: 2023's Canadian wildfire smoke
Overland Park isn't a wildfire town, but it isn't immune to smoke from somewhere else. In June 2023, smoke from record wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario drifted more than a thousand miles south and blanketed the Midwest; Kansas City spent part of that week under an air quality alert with conditions rated unhealthy for sensitive groups. NASA's Earth Observatory tracked the same smoke plume settling over the upper Midwest that month.
That kind of event is genuinely rare here — most years, Overland Park never sees anything like it — but it's a reminder that a clean local geography doesn't make a city smoke-proof. When it does happen, it stacks directly on top of whatever the local ozone forecast already says, which is exactly the kind of moment Canairy is built to catch.
Overland Park air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Overland Park right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Overland Park, Kansas is AQI 16 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Overland Park get Ozone Alert Days in summer?
From March through October, the Mid-America Regional Council's SkyCast forecast tracks ground-level ozone for the whole Kansas City region, and Overland Park's mix of hot, humid afternoons and heavy traffic on I-435 and US-69 regularly pushes readings into orange or red Alert Day territory. On those days Johnson County recommends moving strenuous outdoor activity to before 11 a.m. or after 8 p.m. and cutting back on driving.
Does wildfire smoke ever reach Overland Park?
It's rare, but not impossible. In June 2023, smoke from historic wildfires in Quebec and Ontario drifted over the entire Midwest and put Kansas City under an air quality alert for several days. Overland Park doesn't have a local fire season the way parts of the West do, but smoke from far-off fires can still show up here occasionally.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Overland Park, 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 Overland Park
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