Air Quality in Sioux Falls, South Dakota — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Sioux Falls — with free alerts the moment smoke or summer ozone moves in.
AQI 53 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is AQI 53 — Moderate and falling — with PM2.5 at 10.4 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
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 Sioux Falls: 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 Sioux Falls and Brandon, Tea, Harrisburg, Dell Rapids. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
On a typical day, Sioux Falls has some of the cleanest air of any mid-size American city — the near-constant wind blowing across the flat, open farmland of eastern South Dakota keeps pollution from settling, and PurpleAir and state monitors alike usually read Good. The exception arrived hard in the summer of 2023, when smoke drifting down from more than 90 wildfires burning across Canada pushed the local Air Quality Index into unhealthy territory more than once between May and August, and the state issued a string of air quality alerts unlike anything most residents had seen before.
What Canairy does for Sioux Falls
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Sioux Falls: 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 Sioux Falls or across the country, on one screen.
Why the air here is usually this good
Sioux Falls sits in rolling hills at the junction of Interstates 29 and 90, on the flat, mostly treeless farmland of eastern South Dakota. There's rarely anything to block the wind, and that wind is the city's biggest air quality asset: pollution has nowhere to pool the way it does in a mountain valley or river basin. On a normal day the readings here sit in the high 30s on the AQI scale, with fine particle (PM2.5) levels low enough to meet the World Health Organization's annual guideline.
Ozone is the pollutant that actually moves the needle locally. South Dakota's Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources tests for it, along with particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide, at its Sioux Falls monitoring site. On hot, still days in July and August — exactly the kind the city's humid continental climate produces most summers, with hot, humid stretches sandwiched between cold, dry winters — ozone can push the AQI up into the 50s, into Moderate territory, even with nothing burning nearby.
2023 was the year Canadian smoke found Sioux Falls
Sioux Falls had dealt with distant wildfire smoke before, but the 2023 Canadian fire season made it a recurring story instead of a one-off. On May 16, 2023, the National Weather Service warned that smoke from more than 90 active fires burning across Canada would reduce visibility and push air quality into unhealthy territory across the Sioux Falls area; two days later the state's Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, together with the Department of Health, issued a formal air quality alert for the region.
That was only the start. At the peak of one of that summer's smoke events, the local AQI climbed as high as 152 — solidly in the unhealthy range — and on August 29, 2023, state officials issued yet another alert as a fresh round of Canadian wildfire smoke moved back into the area. For a city used to checking the weather app and not the air quality one, it was a real shift, and it's part of why Canairy exists: the sensors show smoke arriving well before it's visible from a front porch.
The smell everyone in town already knows about
Sioux Falls' most talked-about air issue isn't smoke — it's the Smithfield Foods pork plant, a century-old campus just north of Falls Park in the middle of downtown. Longtime residents have simply learned to live with the odor on certain wind days, and while South Dakota doesn't have the statutory authority to regulate smell the way it regulates pollutants, the plant has made real changes: a new hog barn and added air-scrubbing equipment cut methane emissions from the site starting around 2021.
In February 2026, Smithfield announced a $1.3 billion replacement plant at Foundation Park, on the city's northwest side near Crooks, citing odor reduction as a central reason for the move — company representatives have said a modern plant is built so neighbors can 'hardly even smell anything.' The move has drawn its own pushback, with Crooks-area residents raising concerns in court over permitting, traffic, and property values, a reminder that the story of local air quality in Sioux Falls isn't only about AQI numbers.
Sioux Falls air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Sioux Falls right now?
As of August 24, 2026 at 10:50 AM CDT, the air quality in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is AQI 53 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 10.4 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why did Sioux Falls get so many air quality alerts in 2023?
An unusually severe Canadian wildfire season sent smoke drifting into eastern South Dakota repeatedly that year. The National Weather Service and the state issued alerts in May and again in late August 2023, and the local AQI reached as high as 152 - solidly in the unhealthy range - during one of that summer's smoke events. It was one of the most sustained stretches of bad air Sioux Falls has seen in recent memory.
What's the smell sometimes coming from downtown Sioux Falls?
That's usually the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant just north of Falls Park, a fixture in the city for over a century. It's an odor issue more than a regulated-pollutant one - South Dakota doesn't have legal authority to regulate smell - but the company has added air-scrubbing equipment and, in February 2026, announced a $1.3 billion replacement plant at Foundation Park built specifically to cut the odor.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Sioux Falls, 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 Sioux Falls
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