Air Quality in Sacramento, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Sacramento — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 38 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Sacramento, California is AQI 38 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 6.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 33 to 52. 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 Sacramento: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a low 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 Sacramento and Davis, Elk Grove, Roseville, West Sacramento. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Sacramento
The sensors Canairy reads in Sacramento are 19 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 0.9 mi S | 52 | Moderate |
| 2.8 mi SE | 33 | Good |
| 4.5 mi SE | 39 | Good |
| 7.4 mi S | 38 | Good |
Most days in Sacramento the air is fine, and the region has actually cut its worst ozone days to record lows in recent years. But the city sits in a bowl at the bottom of the Sacramento Valley, and that geography is unforgiving: wildfire smoke settles in and lingers, summer heat cooks up ozone, and winter nights fill with wood smoke. When the Camp Fire burned in November 2018, Sacramento briefly had the worst air pollution of any major city on Earth.
What Canairy does for Sacramento
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Sacramento: 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 Sacramento or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Sacramento is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 46 | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | 44 | Good | ozone |
| Monday | 51 | Moderate | ozone |
| Tuesday | 54 | Moderate | ozone |
| Wednesday | 61 | Moderate | ozone |
Friday, low-level mixing will be enhanced as an upper-level trough of low pressure remains over northern California. In addition, mild temperatures will limit ozone production. Therefore, despite light onshore surface winds hindering dispersion, ozone levels will be Good. Saturday, light onshore winds will persist, limiting dispersion. Furthermore, mostly sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-80s will aid ozone development. However, low pollutant carryover from the previous day will lead to high-Good ozone levels. Sunday, sunny skies will continue to support ozone formation. However, increasing onshore surface winds will promote dispersion, and a trough of low pressure aloft over the region will enhance atmospheric mixing. Thus, ozone levels will remain high-Good.
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Sacramento reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
Wildfire smoke doesn't have to be local to choke the city
Sacramento sits downwind and downhill of some of California's most fire-prone country, so the smoke that fills the valley often comes from fires burning fifty or a hundred miles away. In November 2018, smoke from the Camp Fire in Butte County drove Sacramento's 24-hour PM2.5 to 263 micrograms per cubic meter, roughly seven times the federal standard and deep into the Hazardous range. Berkeley Earth's data briefly showed Sacramento with the worst air pollution of any major city on the planet, and the region's schools closed.
That was the extreme, but smoke seasons have become a regular feature of late summer and fall. In August and September of 2020, the LNU Lightning Complex and a wave of other Northern California fires turned valley skies a heavy orange-brown and kept air quality unhealthy for days at a time. The pattern is the same each time: once smoke settles into the valley, the same still air that traps it locally means it can hang around long after the flames are out.
The valley bowl is why bad air stalls here
The Sacramento Valley is shaped like a bowl, ringed by the Coast Range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east. On hot, still days a temperature inversion forms, trapping a lid of cooler air near the ground and preventing pollutants from mixing up and away. That is what turns a normal summer afternoon into a smog day, and it is why smoke that drifts in can sit over the city for a week.
There is some relief built into the geography. The Delta breeze usually pushes in from the southwest in the afternoon and helps scour the valley out. But on roughly half the days from July to September a wind pattern called the Schultz Eddy can circle that flow back around, carrying pollution south toward Sacramento instead of clearing it. Combined with the region's intense sun, that is why ground-level ozone is the city's stubborn warm-season problem, running high from roughly May through October.
In winter the smoke comes from chimneys, not fires
Sacramento's air problem doesn't end when fire season does. On cold, calm winter nights the same inversions that trap summer smog trap wood smoke from fireplaces and stoves close to the ground. In winter, more than half of the fine-particle pollution in Sacramento County comes from residential wood burning, and it carries many of the same health risks as wildfire smoke.
That is why the Sac Metro Air District runs its Check Before You Burn program from November 1 through the end of February. Under Rule 421, burning is restricted or banned outright on nights when fine particles are forecast to climb, and the daily status runs from legal-to-burn to all-burning-prohibited. If you heat with wood, checking the burn status before you light a fire is the single most useful winter air-quality habit in this city.
Sacramento air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Sacramento right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:09 AM PDT, the air quality in Sacramento, California is AQI 38 — Good — with PM2.5 at 6.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Sacramento's air get bad even when there's no fire nearby?
The Sacramento Valley is bowl-shaped, so on hot or cold, still days a temperature inversion traps pollutants close to the ground instead of letting them mix away. In summer that intense sun and trapped air produce ground-level ozone, and in winter it traps wood smoke from fireplaces. Smoke from distant wildfires can also drift into the valley and linger for days once it settles.
When can I burn wood in my fireplace in Sacramento?
From November 1 through the end of February, the Sac Metro Air District runs its Check Before You Burn program. On days when fine-particle pollution is forecast to be high, wood burning is restricted or banned under Rule 421, because more than half of Sacramento County's winter PM2.5 comes from wood smoke. Check the daily burn status before you light a fire; Canairy's live readings can help you see when the air is already loaded.
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 Sacramento, 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 Sacramento
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