Air Quality in Rochester, New York — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Rochester — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts in.
AQI 29 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Rochester, New York is AQI 29 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 5.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 23 to 33. 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 Rochester: 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 Rochester and Irondequoit, Greece, Brighton, Henrietta. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Rochester
The sensors Canairy reads in Rochester agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 10-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.6 mi W | 31 | Good |
| 1.0 mi ESE | 23 | Good |
| 1.9 mi SW | 28 | Good |
| 5.8 mi SE | 33 | Good |
For most of the year Rochester breathes easy, tucked against the southern shore of Lake Ontario with clean lake air and low everyday pollution. The exception is smoke: the city sits squarely downwind of Canada's wildfires, and in June 2023 that smoke turned the sky orange, pushed the air quality index past 200, and led Monroe County to declare a public health hazard and close its parks and the Seneca Park Zoo. It came back in July 2026, when a statewide advisory went up as more than 800 fires burned to the north.
What Canairy does for Rochester
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Rochester: 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 Rochester or across the country, on one screen.
The orange-sky days of June 2023 are why a lot of Rochester now watches the air
On June 7, 2023, smoke from wildfires in Quebec and Nova Scotia settled over Monroe County and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation rated Rochester's air as unhealthy. The air quality index climbed past 200 through the morning, deep into the range where the smoke is a risk to everyone, not just people with asthma or heart conditions. Monroe County's public health commissioner declared a public health hazard, the county executive issued an air quality alert, and county parks and the Seneca Park Zoo were closed for the day.
That was not a one-off. In July 2026 a similar plume drifted south as more than 800 wildfires burned across Canada, prompting an air quality advisory for all of New York State and reviving memories of the eerie orange haze. Rochester's own emissions did not cause either episode. The smoke arrived from hundreds of miles away, which is exactly why a clear sky in the morning is no guarantee about the afternoon, and why it helps to have something watching the numbers for you.
Lake Ontario shapes the air as much as it shapes the winters
Rochester's humid continental climate and its spot on Lake Ontario's southern shore make it one of the snowiest large cities on earth, thanks to lake-effect snow rolling off the water. The same lake that dumps that snow also moves air around: a lake breeze can pull cooler, cleaner air onshore on a summer afternoon, while calm, stagnant days let ozone and fine particles build up under a warm cap.
The Genesee River cuts straight through the middle of the city, and the low ground along the river and the lakeshore is where haze and smoke tend to pool when the wind dies down. None of this is dramatic on an ordinary day, but it means air quality is not uniform across the region. A sensor in a sheltered neighborhood near the river can read differently from one up on higher ground, which is why the reading closest to you matters more than a single citywide number.
What Rochester's air is usually made of
Set the wildfire days aside and Rochester's air is generally clean, usually landing in the Good or Moderate range on the US index. In the warmer months the pollutant most likely to nudge the number up is ground-level ozone, which forms on hot, sunny, stagnant afternoons; the DEC names ozone and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as the two summer pollutants it watches most closely across New York.
The city carries a long industrial history from its Eastman Kodak decades, when George Eastman's company turned Rochester into a manufacturing powerhouse from 1892 onward, though that heavy-industry footprint has faded with Kodak's long decline. Today the everyday contributors are more ordinary: traffic on the expressways, and wood smoke from stoves and fireplaces on cold, still winter nights, which can push fine-particle readings up in the neighborhoods where it settles.
Rochester air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Rochester right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in Rochester, New York is AQI 29 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.3 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Rochester get wildfire smoke from Canada?
Rochester sits downwind of Canada's boreal wildfire regions, so when large fires burn in Quebec, Ontario, and further north, the smoke can ride the wind hundreds of miles south into upstate New York. That is what happened in June 2023, when smoke from fires in Quebec and Nova Scotia turned the sky orange, and again in July 2026, when more than 800 fires burning in Canada triggered a statewide air quality advisory. The smoke is not from local sources, which is why clear conditions can change within a day.
How bad did the air get in Rochester during the 2023 wildfire smoke?
On June 7, 2023, the air quality index over Monroe County climbed past 200, into the very unhealthy range where the smoke is a risk to everyone. Monroe County's health commissioner declared a public health hazard, the county issued an air quality alert, and county parks and the Seneca Park Zoo were closed for the day. The New York State DEC rated Rochester's air as unhealthy, blaming particulate matter carried in from Canadian wildfires.
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 Rochester, 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 Rochester
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