Air Quality in Raleigh, North Carolina — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Raleigh — with free alerts when ozone or smoke pushes the air into unhealthy territory.

Live Raleigh AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Raleigh and Cary, Garner, Wake Forest, Knightdale.

Raleigh's air is good most of the year, and it's gotten better: the Triangle logged zero ozone exceedances in 2025, only the second time that's happened since 2000. But this is a Piedmont city built on summer heat, humidity, and highway traffic, and on the hottest, stillest July and August afternoons, ground-level ozone can still climb into Code Orange territory. Late winter brings a different kind of haze — North Carolina burns more prescribed acreage than any other state in the Southeast, and smoke from controlled burns each February and March can drift over the Triangle for a few hours at a stretch.

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

Raleigh's real air story is summer ozone, not wildfire smoke

The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area was formally designated an ozone nonattainment area by the EPA in 1990, after violating the federal standard from 1987 through 1989. It took until December 2007 for the region to earn redesignation back to attainment, on the strength of cleaner vehicles and a roughly 54 percent statewide cut in NOx emissions. That history is why Wake County still runs a summer ozone forecast: heat, sunlight, and tailpipe exhaust are the raw ingredients, and the Piedmont's flat, fall-line terrain does nothing to help disperse them on a windless afternoon.

2025 was about as quiet as ozone season gets — Raleigh posted its highest average July dew point since 1946, and that extra humidity, cloud cover, and afternoon thunderstorms suppressed the ozone chemistry that a hot, dry summer would otherwise favor. That's the exception, not a permanent shift: NC State's own air quality researchers note the state has strung together roughly a decade of attainment through emissions cuts, but a hot, stagnant, high-pressure stretch in July or August can still push the Triangle to a Code Orange action day, when sensitive groups are told to cut back on outdoor exertion.

Late winter and early spring bring prescribed-burn smoke

North Carolina has more wildland-urban interface acreage than any other state, and it leads the Southeast in the prescribed burning used to keep that land from becoming wildfire fuel. Burn season peaks in February and March — dormant-season months the state has designated Prescribed Fire Awareness time — and a single burn typically causes a brief, localized PM2.5 spike lasting only a few hours while the fire is active.

The harder days are when many burns happen at once across the Southeast and a temperature inversion holds the combined smoke close to the ground — conditions NC State's air quality forecasters flag as the trickiest to call, since smoke can arrive from burns well outside Wake County. On March 14, 2024, satellite imagery showed plumes stretching across the whole region, a reminder that a clear morning in Raleigh doesn't guarantee a clear afternoon once burning ramps up elsewhere in the state.

Why Raleigh doesn't get the same smoke seasons as the West

Raleigh sits at the fall line, the low, gently rolling boundary where the Piedmont meets the coastal plain, at an elevation of only about 101 meters (331 feet). There's no mountain valley or basin to trap air the way Western wildfire towns experience it — the terrain here is flat enough that pollution tends to disperse rather than pool, which is a real structural advantage.

That doesn't make Raleigh immune to smoke from far away. In the summer of 2023, smoke from Canada's historic wildfire season pushed into the eastern United States repeatedly, and North Carolina was part of that pattern on several of those days. It's the same reason Canairy tracks live sensor readings instead of assuming a distant, generally clean region can't have a bad afternoon: the source doesn't have to be local for the air to be worth checking.

Raleigh air quality FAQ

What is the air quality in Raleigh right now?

This page shows the current AQI for Raleigh, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

Why does Raleigh get ozone alerts in the summer?

Ground-level ozone forms when heat, strong sunlight, and pollutants from vehicles and other sources react in the air, and Raleigh's hot, humid Piedmont summers are exactly that recipe. The Triangle was under a federal ozone nonattainment designation from 1990 to 2007, and even after a decade of cleaner air, a hot and stagnant stretch in July or August can still push the AQI into Code Orange, when sensitive groups are told to ease up on outdoor exertion.

Why does Raleigh smell smoky in late winter?

From roughly February through March, land managers across North Carolina and the Southeast run prescribed burns to clear undergrowth before wildfire season, and North Carolina leads the region in burned acreage. A single burn usually clears in a few hours, but when many burns overlap or a temperature inversion holds the smoke down, PM2.5 can spike well beyond the immediate area.

What AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0-50 is Good and 51-100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups - kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions - and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Where does Canairy's Raleigh data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Raleigh and surrounding towns, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map - there's no black box.

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