Air Quality in Syracuse, New York — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Syracuse — with free alerts when wildfire smoke or highway pollution spikes.
AQI 1 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Syracuse, New York is AQI 1 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 0.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 1 to 2. 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 Syracuse: 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 Syracuse and DeWitt, Liverpool, Fayetteville, East Syracuse. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Syracuse
The sensors Canairy reads in Syracuse agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 1-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.5 mi ESE | 1 | Good |
| 3.2 mi S | 1 | Good |
| 3.9 mi SSE | 1 | Good |
| 5.7 mi NW | 2 | Good |
Syracuse doesn't carry a wildfire or smog reputation the way West Coast cities do, and most days the air here is genuinely fine. But it isn't immune: in June 2023, smoke from more than 160 wildfires burning across Quebec drifted south on a stalled weather pattern and pushed the city's own reported air quality index past 390 — hazardous by any measure, and enough for the state to tell schools to cancel recess and athletics for days. The rest of Syracuse's air story is quieter and doesn't show up in a single bad week: the elevated I-81 viaduct has carried roughly 100,000 vehicles a day directly over the Near West Side and 15th Ward for six decades, leaving those neighborhoods with a heavier, more constant dose of traffic exhaust than the rest of the city.
What Canairy does for Syracuse
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Syracuse: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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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.
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June 2023: when Quebec's wildfires turned Syracuse's sky orange
On June 7, 2023, the City of Syracuse's own air quality advisory put the index at 391 as of noon — deep into the hazardous range — with some regional readings reaching 402 that same morning. The smoke came from more than 160 wildfires burning across Quebec, carried roughly 400 to 500 miles south by a weather system that stalled near Maine and funneled the plume down into Central New York for days. Governor Kathy Hochul urged school districts statewide to move recess and athletics indoors, and Onondaga County districts along with the City of Syracuse's own Parks and Recreation department suspended outdoor programming until the smoke cleared.
It was the most extreme air-quality event in the city's recent memory, and it wasn't a local failure — Syracuse doesn't sit near major fire country, and the plume that hit it started hundreds of miles away in another country. What it exposed is how fast conditions here can flip: with no wildfire season of its own to build habits around, the region had little practice reading an AQI number before that week. That's exactly why a live, plain-English reading matters here — the next Canadian smoke event won't announce itself any further in advance than the last one did.
The I-81 viaduct put six decades of traffic exhaust over one neighborhood
Interstate 81's elevated viaduct was built through the heart of Syracuse's 15th Ward between 1959 and 1969, cutting through what had been the city's main Black neighborhood and displacing roughly 1,300 residents in the process. What was left behind carries about 100,000 vehicles a day on a 1.4-mile stretch, directly over homes on the Near West Side and South Side — and the pollution didn't stay on the highway. Public health research has tied the corridor to elevated rates of asthma and lead exposure among residents living closest to it, an air-quality burden layered on top of the neighborhood's original displacement.
New York State is now tearing the viaduct down. The $2.25 billion Community Grid project — the largest single road project the state has ever undertaken — began demolition work in 2023 and moved into its second construction phase in 2025, with the elevated structure slated to close for good by the end of 2026 before the corridor is rebuilt as a street-level boulevard. For anyone living or working near the old viaduct route, the construction years themselves bring their own diesel equipment and dust, on top of whatever the finished grid eventually changes about traffic patterns nearby.
Syracuse air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Syracuse right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 8:09 AM EDT, the air quality in Syracuse, New York is AQI 1 — Good — with PM2.5 at 0.1 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why did Syracuse's air quality turn hazardous in June 2023?
Smoke from more than 160 wildfires burning across Quebec drifted roughly 400 to 500 miles south on a stalled weather system, pushing Syracuse's own reported AQI to 391 by midday on June 7, 2023. Governor Hochul urged schools statewide to cancel outdoor activities, and Syracuse's Parks and Recreation department suspended outdoor programming until the smoke cleared. It was an imported event, not a local fire — but it showed how fast conditions here can change when the wind turns the wrong way.
Does the I-81 construction affect air quality near the old viaduct?
The elevated highway that cut through Syracuse's 15th Ward carried around 100,000 vehicles a day for decades, and the neighborhoods nearest it have documented higher rates of asthma tied to that traffic exhaust. New York's Community Grid project is now demolishing the viaduct in phases through 2026, which trades one problem — decades of highway exhaust overhead — for another in the near term: construction dust and diesel equipment, before the corridor becomes an at-grade boulevard.
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 Syracuse, 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 Syracuse
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