Air Quality in Santa Fe, New Mexico — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Santa Fe — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.

Live Santa Fe AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Santa Fe and Eldorado, Tesuque, Pojoaque, Los Alamos.

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.

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.

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?

This page shows the current AQI for Santa Fe, 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 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 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.

Where does Canairy's Santa Fe data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Santa Fe and surrounding communities like Eldorado and Tesuque, 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.

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.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.