Air Quality in Salt Lake City, Utah — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Salt Lake City — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 6 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Salt Lake City, Utah is AQI 6 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 1.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 2 to 10. 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 Salt Lake City: 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 Salt Lake City and West Valley City, Murray, South Salt Lake, Sandy, Bountiful. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Salt Lake City
The sensors Canairy reads in Salt Lake City agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 8-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.9 mi ENE | 4 | Good |
| 4.1 mi E | 2 | Good |
| 4.5 mi S | 10 | Good |
| 4.9 mi SSE | 7 | Good |
Salt Lake City sits in a bowl. The Wasatch Mountains close it on the east, the Oquirrhs on the west, and Traverse Mountain across the south, and the Utah Division of Air Quality says that ring does two things at once: it holds cold air in the valley and it shields the valley from the stronger winds above that would otherwise clear it out. In winter that produces the inversion — cold air pinned under a lid of warmer air, with everything the city emits stuck underneath it. Utah averages about 18 days a year when PM2.5 goes past the national standard, and a typical winter brings five or six multi-day inversion episodes.
What Canairy does for Salt Lake City
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Salt Lake City: 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 Salt Lake City or across the country, on one screen.
The inversion, and why it does not just blow through
Inversions usually set up after a snowstorm. Snow cover keeps the surface air cold while clear skies warm the layer above it, and when a high-pressure system settles in, sinking warm air caps the valley like a lid over a bowl. Pollution then accumulates day after day with nowhere to go. In January 2026 an inversion held over Salt Lake City for more than a week; on Tuesday 13 January the city ranked worst in the nation for air quality, with the AQI at 123 in the middle of the afternoon and mandatory no-burn restrictions in place.
What you are breathing on those days is mostly not soot straight out of a tailpipe. The Division of Air Quality says secondary ammonium nitrate makes up as much as 70 percent of the particulate mass during an inversion — it forms in the air itself, out of nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and organic compounds from vehicles, wood burning, homes and industry. One outside contributor turned out to be unusually large: NOAA research flights in 2017 traced 10 to 25 percent of regional PM2.5 during winter pollution episodes to a single facility, the US Magnesium refinery on the Great Salt Lake, whose chlorine and bromine emissions speed up particle formation. That work was published in early 2023. Regulators have kept the Salt Lake City area on EPA's books as a Serious nonattainment area for the 2006 24-hour PM2.5 standard since 2017, and it was still listed that way as of 30 June 2026.
The lake is drying, and the lakebed blows into town
This one is recent and it is real. Utah's Division of Water Resources reports that more than 800 square miles of Great Salt Lake bed have been exposed as the lake has retreated, with dust becoming a problem where the protective crust has broken down and fine silt and clay are left bare — Farmington Bay and Bear River Bay especially. The agency counts more than 2.66 million people living downwind and names arsenic among the elements of chronic concern in that sediment. On 8 July 2026, thunderstorm outflow winds pushed a visible wall of dust east and south off the lake and across the Salt Lake Valley, with particle pollution running to roughly four times the healthy limit.
Research published in April 2026 by Utah State University and the University of Utah followed the metals further than the air. Leafy vegetables exposed to Great Salt Lake dust held elevated arsenic and uranium even after a thorough wash, and in the team's modelling more than a third of the exposure scenarios for children passed the level of concern for toxic metals. The practical point for anyone with a sensor: a dust event looks like a smoke event on the readout. A PurpleAir monitor counts fine particles, and it will not tell you whether they came off a fire or off the lakebed.
Summer swaps particles for ozone and smoke
The warm half of the year has its own problem. The Northern Wasatch Front — Salt Lake, Davis, Weber and Tooele counties — was designated nonattainment in 2018 under the 2015 ozone standard of 70 parts per billion, was moved up to Moderate, and was reclassified to Serious in December 2024. In April 2026 EPA proposed repealing that reclassification, arguing the area would have met the standard but for emissions transported in from outside the United States and smoke from wildfires. Whichever way that lands, the ozone itself has been stubborn: state researchers note that the fourth-highest 8-hour ozone reading each year has barely moved over the past decade even as nitrogen dioxide fell substantially.
Wildfire smoke sits on top of all of it. A study run in the Salt Lake region in summer 2022, SAMOZA, was designed partly to work out how much smoke was distorting ozone measurements and how much worse pollutant levels ran on smoke days versus clear ones. In practice that means a July afternoon here can be bad for two different reasons at once, and only one of them shows up on a particle sensor.
Salt Lake City air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Salt Lake City right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 6:11 AM MDT, the air quality in Salt Lake City, Utah is AQI 6 — Good — with PM2.5 at 1.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Salt Lake City today?
In summer it is usually wildfire smoke, either from fires burning in Utah or from fires hundreds of miles away in the West that the upper-level winds carry over the valley. In winter, haze that looks like smoke is far more likely to be an inversion: cold air trapped under warm air, holding vehicle exhaust, wood smoke and industrial emissions in the valley for days. And there is a third possibility that is specific to this place. Strong winds off the exposed bed of the Great Salt Lake can push dust across the valley, as they did on 8 July 2026, and on a sensor that dust reads much like smoke.
How long does a Salt Lake City inversion usually last?
Days, and sometimes well over a week. Inversions typically form after a snowstorm and hold as long as the high-pressure system above the valley holds. The Utah Division of Air Quality says a typical winter brings roughly five or six multi-day episodes, and Utah averages about 18 days a year when PM2.5 exceeds the national standard. The inversion that settled over the city in January 2026 lasted more than a week before a weather change cleared it.
Is the dust from the Great Salt Lake actually dangerous?
State agencies and university researchers are taking it seriously. Utah's Division of Water Resources says more than 800 square miles of lakebed are now exposed, identifies arsenic among the elements of chronic concern in the sediment, and counts more than 2.66 million people living downwind. Utah State University and University of Utah research published in April 2026 found elevated arsenic and uranium in leafy vegetables exposed to the dust even after washing, and modelled child exposure above levels of concern in more than a third of scenarios. What a home sensor can tell you is when particle levels spike; it cannot tell you what those particles are made of.
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 Salt Lake City, 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 Salt Lake City
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