Air Quality in Provo, Utah — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Provo — with free alerts when Utah Valley's winter inversions push the air unhealthy.
AQI 16 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Provo, Utah is AQI 16 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 3.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 14 to 18. 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 Provo: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a 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 Provo and Orem, Springville, Spanish Fork, Pleasant Grove. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Provo
The sensors Canairy reads in Provo agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 4-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.8 mi NW | 18 | Good |
| 3.3 mi NW | 14 | Good |
| 4.8 mi NNW | 18 | Good |
| 4.8 mi NW | 15 | Good |
Provo's air is genuinely good for most of the year — long, dry summers and the Wasatch peaks framing the skyline are real, not marketing. The exception is winter. Provo sits at the bottom of Utah Valley, and when a cold-air inversion settles in, exhaust and wood smoke get trapped close to the ground for days at a stretch. That pattern is what earned Provo and Orem a federal 'nonattainment' label back in 2009 for missing the PM2.5 standard — a designation the EPA finally lifted in November 2025, the first time the metro area has met that bar in fifteen years.
What Canairy does for Provo
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Provo: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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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 Provo or across the country, on one screen.
Why Provo's air turns bad in winter, not summer
Provo sits on the east side of Utah Valley, a bowl pinched between the Wasatch Range and Utah Lake, with Orem, Springville, and the rest of Utah County packed onto the valley floor around it. In summer, daytime heating mixes the air and clears it out. In winter, calm high-pressure days let cold, dense air pool at the bottom of that bowl under a warmer layer above — a temperature inversion — and there's nowhere for exhaust, wood smoke, and other fine particles to go.
University of Utah atmospheric scientist Kevin Perry put it plainly to Fox 13 News: cold air 'settles in the bottom of the valley and it traps all of our local pollutants.' Those trapped particles are PM2.5 — fine enough to reach deep into the lungs — and Perry says wintertime exposure can trigger asthma flare-ups, chronic bronchitis, and in more serious cases, heart attack, stroke, and premature death.
Provo just came off the EPA's nonattainment list, after 15 years
Utah County and Salt Lake County were formally designated 'nonattainment' for the 2006 24-hour PM2.5 standard back in 2009 — official recognition that winter pollution here regularly crossed the federal health line. On November 19, 2025, the EPA redesignated both areas to attainment. EPA regional administrator Cyrus Western credited 'the hard work that Utah has done over the past decade,' while Utah Division of Air Quality director Bryce Bird pointed to 23 new state rules plus incentive programs that paid to retrofit or replace old wood stoves and diesel vehicles, alongside transit upgrades across the valley.
The milestone comes with a caveat locals should know. Dr. Brian Moench of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment has cautioned that the valley is 'barely in attainment,' and health officials worry that a single unusually calm, cold winter with several long inversions could push the numbers back over the line before the state's required 20-year maintenance period is up. Utah's separate ground-level ozone problem, a summertime standard, is still unresolved for the Wasatch Front.
What's actually in the air, and what Provo is doing about it
Unlike a lot of the cities Canairy covers, Provo's worst air days aren't about wildfire smoke — they're homegrown. Tailpipe exhaust and residential wood burning are the two sources state officials keep coming back to, and both concentrate in the valley precisely because the inversion has nowhere to vent them. Cleaner Tier 3 gasoline, required nationwide since 2017, has already cut per-vehicle emissions by as much as 80% compared with older fuel, which is a real part of why the numbers have improved.
The other half of the fix has been aimed at chimneys, not tailpipes: state and county incentive programs pay Utah Valley homeowners to retrofit or swap out older wood stoves for cleaner-burning models, since a single old stove running on a cold, trapped-air night can put out as much fine particulate as dozens of cars. The hay fields still visible around the edges of Provo and Springville are not a significant part of the story here — this valley's pollution problem has always been about tailpipes and chimneys, not dust or agriculture.
Provo air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Provo right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:10 AM MDT, the air quality in Provo, Utah is AQI 16 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Provo's air get bad in winter?
Provo sits at the bottom of Utah Valley, boxed in by the Wasatch Range to the east. On calm winter days, cold air pools at the valley floor under a warmer layer above — a temperature inversion — and traps tailpipe exhaust and wood smoke close to the ground, sometimes for a week or more at a stretch. Summer air is usually much cleaner because daytime heat mixes it out instead of trapping it.
Did Provo really just get off the EPA's nonattainment list?
Yes. On November 19, 2025, the EPA redesignated the Provo and Salt Lake City metro areas from nonattainment to attainment for the 2006 PM2.5 24-hour standard, ending a designation that had been in place since 2009. Utah officials point to cleaner vehicle fuel, wood stove replacement incentives, and transit upgrades as the main drivers, though local doctors note the valley is only barely inside the line and a bad inversion winter could change that.
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 Provo, 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 Provo
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