Air Quality in Spokane, Washington — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Spokane — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 19 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Spokane, Washington is AQI 19 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 43. 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 Spokane: 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 Spokane and Spokane Valley, Cheney, Liberty Lake, Deer Park. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Spokane
The sensors Canairy reads in Spokane agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 42-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.2 mi ENE | 14 | Good |
| 1.5 mi S | 24 | Good |
| 2.8 mi SE | 1 | Good |
| 3.4 mi NE | 43 | Good |
Spokane sits in dry pine country east of the Cascades, and for most of the summer the air is clean and easy. The trouble comes with fire season: smoke from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California drifts in and settles over the valley, and some years it stays for days. In August 2023 the Gray and Oregon Road fires burned right on the city's doorstep, killing two people and leaving hundreds without homes as hazardous smoke hung over the county.
What Canairy does for Spokane
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Spokane: 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 Spokane or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Spokane is doing next
| When | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|
| Today | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | Good | ozone |
| Monday | Good | ozone |
| Tuesday | Good | ozone |
Forecast Discussion – We should expect active weather with scattered showers, possible thunderstorms, and cooler than normal temperatures through Labor Day Weekend. Air quality should be in the AQI-Good category much of the time Friday through Tuesday. /MC (Issued 9/4/26 8:00AM)
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Spokane 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.
The 2023 Gray and Oregon Road fires burned at the city's edge
On August 18, 2023, the Gray Fire ignited near Medical Lake, just southwest of Spokane, and raced across roughly 10,000 acres, destroying about 240 structures and killing 86-year-old Carl Grub. The same weekend, the Oregon Road Fire broke out near Elk to the north and burned a similar amount of land; a 49-year-old man, Alex Brown, died of smoke inhalation and thermal injuries. Together the two fires forced thousands to evacuate and left hundreds of families without homes.
For people in Spokane, this was not distant smoke from somewhere else. The fires were close enough that the whole county was choked with haze, and air quality across much of the area climbed into the hazardous range over the weekend. It was a reminder that in this landscape, the fire and the smoke can arrive together, with very little warning.
Smoke seasons that settle in and stay
Spokane's worst smoke often does not come from a local fire at all. Because the city sits in a valley east of the Cascades, smoke from fires across the Northwest and California drifts in on regional winds and pools over the area. September 2020 was the clearest example: a plume from California and Oregon fires brought seven straight days of unhealthy-to-hazardous air, with a peak AQI of 479 and four consecutive days in the hazardous range. Spokane Clean Air called those levels unprecedented in the more than 50 years it has been measuring pollution.
This is a recent shift, not a permanent fact of life here. From 1999 through 2011 the agency recorded zero days where wildfire smoke kept the air unhealthy for a full 24 hours. That changed sharply in 2015, when 13 such days hit, and heavy smoke summers have kept returning since. Even this July, smoke from fires southeast of the city settled over downtown and Spokane Valley and pushed readings into the hazardous range.
Winter brings a different kind of smoke
Fire season is not the only time Spokane's air turns bad. In winter, high pressure and cold Canadian air create temperature inversions, a lid of warmer air that traps cold, still air near the ground. Wood smoke from fireplaces and stoves collects under that lid, and fine-particle pollution builds up with nowhere to go.
When that happens, the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency issues burn bans across the Smoke Control Zone, restricting the use of uncertified wood stoves and fireplaces until the air clears. These bans show up most winters, and they are a good signal that the air outside is worse than the cold, clear sky might suggest. Field burning across the surrounding Palouse farmland was once a bigger source too, until Washington banned grass burning in 1998 after years of air-quality complaints in the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene areas.
Spokane air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Spokane right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 5:09 AM PDT, the air quality in Spokane, Washington is AQI 19 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Spokane get so smoky in the summer?
Spokane sits in a valley east of the Cascades in dry pine country, and smoke from wildfires across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California drifts in on regional winds and settles over the area. Some years it lingers for days: in September 2020 the city saw seven straight days of unhealthy-to-hazardous air with a peak AQI of 479, levels Spokane Clean Air called unprecedented in more than 50 years of measurement.
Does Spokane's air quality get bad in winter too?
Yes. In winter, temperature inversions trap cold, still air near the ground, and wood smoke from fireplaces and stoves builds up underneath. When fine-particle pollution climbs, the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency issues burn bans restricting uncertified wood stoves and fireplaces. A burn ban is a good sign the air is worse than the clear cold sky suggests.
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 Spokane, 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 Spokane
We watch Spokane'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.