Air Quality in Santa Fe, New Mexico — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Santa Fe — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 1 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Santa Fe, New Mexico is AQI 1 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 0.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 13. 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 Santa Fe: 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 Santa Fe and Eldorado, Tesuque, Pojoaque, Los Alamos. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Santa Fe
The sensors Canairy reads in Santa Fe agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 12-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0 mi NE | 4 | Good |
| 2.9 mi SE | 1 | Good |
| 5.5 mi NE | 13 | Good |
| 6.7 mi WNW | 1 | Good |
At just under 7,000 feet, Santa Fe sits at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico's high desert, and for most of the year the thin, dry air here is genuinely clean. There's no refinery skyline, no port, and no freeway trench cutting through downtown — this isn't a city with a daily industrial pollution problem. The exception is smoke: Santa Fe is ringed by the Santa Fe National Forest, and when a fire burns anywhere in that forest, or in the mountains beyond it, the smoke has a way of finding the city even when the flames never get close.
What Canairy does for Santa Fe
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Santa Fe: 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 Santa Fe or across the country, on one screen.
Santa Fe rarely burns, but it breathes the forest around it
The clearest example is the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, which started in April 2022 when a Forest Service prescribed burn near Hermits Peak escaped its lines, then three weeks later merged with a second fire smoldering from leftover burn piles near Calf Canyon. Together they burned 341,471 acres across San Miguel, Mora, and Taos counties — the largest wildfire in New Mexico history — and the smoke columns were visible for long distances in Santa Fe, Taos, Moriarty, and Albuquerque, long before most residents of those cities could see any actual flame.
It wasn't the first time smoke from the Santa Fe National Forest reached the city from somewhere else. The Tres Lagunas Fire broke out near Pecos in May 2013, about 25 miles east of Santa Fe, after a downed power line sparked a blaze that a 40 mph wind whipped into a frenzy; the state issued smoke advisories as the plume blew southeast over the I-25 corridor. Two years earlier, the Las Conchas Fire tore through the Jemez Mountains west of Los Alamos, burning 156,293 acres after wind blew a rotted aspen tree into a power line — proof that fire in forest close enough to Santa Fe rarely leaves the city's air alone.
The mountains that shelter Santa Fe also hem the smoke in
Santa Fe sits in a valley on the edge of the Rio Grande rift, with the Sangre de Cristo range — Santa Fe Baldy tops out at 12,622 feet — rising directly behind the city to the east. That same range holds the southern end of the Santa Fe National Forest, the forest where the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon and Tres Lagunas fires both burned. When smoke pushes off those slopes, the basin the city sits in is exactly the kind of terrain that lets it collect rather than blow straight through.
New Mexico's Environment Department runs a Smoke Management Program that permits and coordinates the prescribed burns meant to reduce this exact wildfire risk, and its Air Quality Bureau points residents to wildlandfiresmoke.net for smoke outlooks during fire season. The irony of Hermits Peak — a planned burn that became the state's worst wildfire on record — is part of why the agency now treats every burn window in the hills above Santa Fe, planned or wild, as something the city's air can end up wearing.
What to actually do when the smoke rolls in
Check the air before you commit to a hike up in the foothills or an afternoon on the Plaza, not after your eyes start to sting. Close windows early once a smoke event starts — thick adobe walls help hold a house's temperature, but they don't seal out fine particles on their own, and once smoke settles indoors it can take hours to clear.
If anyone in your home has asthma, is pregnant, is a kid, or is over 65, it's worth knowing your number before the sky looks smoky, since the fine particles that matter most are often in the air before you can smell campfire smoke at all. Canairy reads the PurpleAir sensors around Santa Fe so you don't have to keep checking a map every time a new fire starts somewhere out in the forest.
Santa Fe air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Santa Fe right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:10 AM MDT, the air quality in Santa Fe, New Mexico is AQI 1 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Santa Fe get smoky even when the fire isn't close by?
Santa Fe is ringed by the Santa Fe National Forest, and fires burning anywhere in that forest or the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains can send smoke into the city's basin even when the flames stay many miles away. The 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire — New Mexico's largest wildfire on record — sent smoke columns that were visible in Santa Fe from more than 50 miles north, and the 2013 Tres Lagunas Fire near Pecos and 2011 Las Conchas Fire near Los Alamos did the same from the east and west.
Does Santa Fe's high elevation affect its air quality?
Santa Fe sits at almost 7,000 feet in a high-desert climate, with no refineries, ports, or heavy industry driving day-to-day pollution, which is a big part of why the air here is good most of the year. The elevation doesn't cause pollution on its own; the real swings come from wildfire smoke drifting in from the surrounding Santa Fe National Forest, not from anything the city itself puts into the air.
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 Santa Fe, 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 Santa Fe
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