Air Quality in South Burlington, Vermont — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across South Burlington and the Champlain Valley — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 12 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in South Burlington, Vermont is AQI 12 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 2.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 11 to 17. 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 South Burlington: 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 South Burlington and Burlington, Winooski, Williston, Shelburne. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in South Burlington
The sensors Canairy reads in South Burlington agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 6-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.8 mi WSW | 12 | Good |
| 1.9 mi WNW | 13 | Good |
| 3.3 mi NNE | 17 | Good |
| 5.2 mi NE | 13 | Good |
| 6.2 mi ENE | 11 | Good |
For most of the year, South Burlington's air is about as clean as it gets in the United States — Vermont has no major refineries or ports and only light traffic by national standards, and Lake Champlain's breezes keep the Champlain Valley well ventilated. That changed hard in June 2023, when smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles north in Quebec pushed Chittenden County's air into the "very unhealthy" range for hours at a stretch, a reminder that Burlington sits under 50 miles from the Canadian border and less than 100 from Montreal — closer to those fires than most Vermonters are used to thinking about.
What Canairy does for South Burlington
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for South Burlington: 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 South Burlington or across the country, on one screen.
June 2023 brought Quebec's wildfires to Vermont's doorstep
Smoke arrived in two distinct waves that June. On June 5 and 6, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation issued an air quality advisory as haze from wildfires burning across Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Alberta rolled south; Bennett Leon, the state's air quality chief, called it "the first time this year it affected Vermont so heavily." Three weeks later, overnight from June 25 into the morning of June 26, Burlington's air was rated "very unhealthy" by EPA standards for hours at a stretch — a level state officials said may have set a Vermont record for wildfire smoke pollution.
The closeness of the source was the story. Schools in the area responded differently depending on their read of the air: Williston Central moved PE classes indoors for grades 3 through 8 during the early-June smoke, while Champlain Valley School District kept its usual 20-minute recess outside. One student summed up what made this smoke different from the Western wildfire coverage Vermonters were used to seeing on the news: "It's different that it's close."
Winter adds a second, quieter source: wood heat
Vermont heats with wood more than any other state — 13% of Vermont households burn wood as their primary heating fuel, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, more than ten times the national average of 1.3%. That's more a rural-Vermont statistic than a South Burlington one, but the city sits at the bottom of the Champlain Valley, downwind of the wood-burning towns that ring it, and on the coldest, stillest nights that smoke has nowhere to go.
The Vermont Department of Health lists "thermal inversions" alongside ozone and particle pollution as one of the three conditions that can trigger a statewide air quality alert, and its guidance for those days is blunt: cut back on driving, skip the gas-powered yard equipment, and don't burn leaves or trash outside. It's a lower-grade problem than a smoke-choked June, showing up quietly a few times most winters rather than as one dramatic week.
A lake to the west, mountains on both sides
South Burlington sits inside the Champlain Valley, with Lake Champlain and Shelburne Bay forming its western edge, the Green Mountains rising to the east, and New York's Adirondacks visible across the water. That open lake frontage gives the city a milder, more ventilated setting than valley towns boxed in on all sides — this isn't a spot that regularly traps its own exhaust and wood smoke the way a mountain-ringed valley can.
But the same flat, low corridor that keeps local air moving also gives outside smoke an easy path in. The Quebec smoke of June 2023 crossed nothing but farmland and open water on its way south, and when the wind sets up out of the north, South Burlington has essentially no terrain to slow it down before it arrives.
South Burlington air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in South Burlington right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 6:17 PM EDT, the air quality in South Burlington, Vermont is AQI 12 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Canadian wildfire smoke hit South Burlington so hard in June 2023?
Vermont sits close to Quebec — Burlington is under 50 miles from the border and less than 100 from Montreal — so smoke from a bad Quebec fire season has a short, flat path south. In June 2023, two separate waves of smoke from wildfires burning in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and Nova Scotia pushed Chittenden County's air to "very unhealthy" levels that state officials said may have set a Vermont record for wildfire smoke pollution.
Does South Burlington get wood smoke in winter?
Vermont heats with wood more than any other state — about 13% of households burn wood as their primary heat source, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. South Burlington itself is more suburban than rural Vermont, but on the coldest, stillest nights smoke from surrounding towns can settle into the valley, which is why the Vermont Department of Health lists thermal inversions alongside ozone and particle pollution as one of its three air quality alert triggers.
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 South Burlington, 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 South Burlington
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