Air Quality in Santa Rosa, California — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Santa Rosa — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 24 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Santa Rosa, California is AQI 24 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 4.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 13 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 Santa Rosa: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate 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 Rosa and Rohnert Park, Windsor, Sebastopol, Kenwood. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Santa Rosa
The sensors Canairy reads in Santa Rosa agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 20-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5 mi NNW | 24 | Good |
| 2.4 mi ENE | 23 | Good |
| 2.9 mi NNE | 24 | Good |
| 4.0 mi NNW | 13 | Good |
| 5.8 mi SE | 33 | Good |
Most of the year, Santa Rosa's air is genuinely good. But anyone who has lived through a Sonoma County fire season knows how fast that can change — clear skies at breakfast, smoke by dinner.
What Canairy does for Santa Rosa
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Santa Rosa: 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 Rosa or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Santa Rosa is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 36 | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | 37 | Good | ozone |
| Monday | 38 | Good | ozone |
| Tuesday | — | Good | ozone |
| Wednesday | — | Good | ozone |
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Santa Rosa 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.
Santa Rosa knows wildfire smoke
The Tubbs Fire burned into the city itself in October 2017, destroying homes in Coffey Park and Fountaingrove and leaving Santa Rosa under hazardous smoke for weeks. Three years later the Glass Fire came over the Mayacamas into the city's eastern edge near Skyhawk and Oakmont.
And even fires that never reach the city can dominate its air. The Kincade Fire in 2019 and the LNU Lightning Complex in 2020 both filled the Santa Rosa plain with smoke from miles away. That's the recurring lesson here: smoke doesn't respect fire perimeters, and the evacuation map tells you nothing about what you're breathing.
Smoke season runs roughly August through November
Fall is when offshore Diablo winds arrive — hot, dry gusts out of the north and east that drive the county's most dangerous fires. On those days the AQI can swing from Good to Very Unhealthy overnight.
A single citywide number also hides a lot. Smoke settles unevenly across the Santa Rosa plain, so Bennett Valley, Coffey Park, and Roseland can be breathing noticeably different air at the same moment. That's why Canairy reads the dense network of PurpleAir sensors across the city instead of one distant monitoring station — the reading you see comes from sensors near the places you actually saved.
What to actually do on a smoke day
Check the air before you commit to outdoor plans, not after your throat starts to itch. Close windows early — once smoke is indoors it takes hours to clear. If someone in your house has asthma, is pregnant, is a kid, or is over 65, it's worth knowing your number before the sky looks bad, because fine smoke particles do their damage well before the air smells like a campfire.
Canairy is built by two people in Sonoma County who have lived through these seasons — it exists so you don't have to keep refreshing a map in October. Set your threshold once, and we'll tell you when the air crosses it, and when it clears.
Santa Rosa air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Santa Rosa right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 10:52 AM PDT, the air quality in Santa Rosa, California is AQI 24 — Good — with PM2.5 at 4.4 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Santa Rosa get smoky in late summer and fall?
August through November is Northern California's peak fire season, and fall Diablo winds — hot, dry offshore gusts — have driven Sonoma County's most destructive fires, including the Tubbs Fire in 2017 and the Kincade Fire in 2019. Smoke from fires anywhere in the region can settle over the Santa Rosa plain, even when the fire itself is far away.
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 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Santa Rosa, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near Santa Rosa
We watch Santa Rosa's air. You live your life.
Set your threshold once and get a heads-up only when the air actually changes for you. Free on the App Store & Google Play.