Air Quality in Tucson, Arizona — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Tucson — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 11 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Tucson, Arizona is AQI 11 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 2.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 11 to 13. 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 Tucson: 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 Tucson and Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita, Green Valley. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Tucson
The sensors Canairy reads in Tucson agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 2-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.8 mi WNW | 11 | Good |
| 4.9 mi N | 11 | Good |
| 6.2 mi NNE | 11 | Good |
| 6.5 mi NNW | 12 | Good |
| 7.3 mi E | 13 | Good |
Tucson sits in its own basin, ringed by the Santa Catalinas, Rincons, Santa Ritas and Tucson Mountains, and its air is measurably better than the Valley's up north. The University of Arizona's MAP Dashboard, working from EPA data, put Tucson at 33.7 per cent Good air quality days in 2025 against 6.6 per cent for Phoenix, with 97.8 per cent of days Good or Moderate. The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report ranks Tucson-Nogales 41st worst in the country for ozone and 53rd for short-term particle pollution, well behind Phoenix-Mesa at fourth and 17th. What Tucson has instead of a chronic problem is a handful of sharp events — fires in the mountains it looks at every day, and dust that arrives with the monsoon.
What Canairy does for Tucson
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Tucson: 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 Tucson or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in Tucson is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 46 | Good | PM2.5 |
| Tomorrow | 40 | Good | ozone |
| Sunday | 39 | Good | ozone |
| Monday | 41 | Good | ozone |
[View the ADEQ Hourly Forecast for Tucson] All pollutants easily stayed in the Good AQI range again yesterday. Looking ahead, we don't expect any major issues. There will be chances for showers and thunderstorms around the area most afternoons, which may cause some gusty winds at times. However, we don't expect any winds strong enough to cause significant dust issues. Overall, all pollutants are forecast to stay in the Good AQI category through the forecast period. R. Nicoll https://azdeq.gov/forecast/tucson Last Update: Thursday, September 10, 2026, 8:28 AM
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Tucson 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 Catalinas burn, and Tucson breathes it
A lightning strike at 9.46pm on 5 June 2020 started the Bighorn Fire in the Santa Catalina Mountains. It burned 119,987 acres before being declared out on 23 July, forcing evacuations first in the Catalina Foothills, then Oro Valley, then Mount Lemmon and Summerhaven on 16 June. Seven people were injured and suppression cost roughly $37 million. Crews were slowed by rugged terrain, high winds and invasive buffelgrass — an African grass planted across Arizona from the 1930s for erosion control and cattle forage, which now fills the gaps between native desert plants and carries fire across ground that historically did not burn.
It was not the first. The Aspen Fire started on 17 June 2003 on Mount Lemmon, burned 84,750 acres before containment on 12 July, and destroyed 340 homes and businesses in Summerhaven. Both fires burned in mountains that rise directly above the north and east edge of the city, which is why a Catalina fire is not a distant news story here — it is a month or more of smoke you can see from your driveway.
Monsoon dust is the other half of the story
Tucson's dust does not always come from Tucson. On 20 June 2024 a haboob that National Weather Service meteorologist Jason Laney described as roughly 200 miles across formed over southern New Mexico and west Texas and pushed into Arizona. Tucson recorded gusts to 36 mph, hit 109 degrees, and watched PM10 climb from moderate in the morning to a brief spike into the orange, unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups band at the storm's peak.
The traffic runs the other way too. The outflows behind the famous 5 July 2011 haboob — the one that pushed peak hourly PM10 to 1,974 micrograms per cubic metre at EPA monitors near Phoenix — formed from thunderstorms southeast of Tucson before merging on their way northwest. In between, the ten-mile stretch of I-10 between Eloy and Picacho Peak is dangerous enough in blowing dust that ADOT installed 13 visibility sensors and variable speed signs there, able to drop the posted 75 mph limit as low as 35.
Pima County meets the standards nearly everywhere — with one exception
Pima County is in attainment of every federal ambient air quality standard except in one place: the Rillito area northwest of Tucson, which remains nonattainment for PM10. The county attributes that to nearby agricultural land, emissions from Arizona Portland Cement, and fugitive dust thrown up by vehicle traffic. Tucson itself sits under a limited maintenance plan for carbon monoxide, a leftover from the years when winter CO was the city's headline pollutant.
For everything else, the county's own emissions inventory points at the obvious culprit and one less obvious one: on-road motor vehicles are the largest source of nitrogen oxides in Pima County at 46.5 per cent of the total, while 80.9 per cent of volatile organic compounds come from natural, biogenic sources — the desert itself. Pima County DEQ runs 15 electronically polled monitoring stations across eastern Pima County including the Tucson metro area and Green Valley, and since July 2023 has also run a school-based sensor programme measuring particulates, carbon monoxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides on campuses.
Tucson air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Tucson right now?
As of September 11, 2026 at 5:10 AM MST, the air quality in Tucson, Arizona is AQI 11 — Good — with PM2.5 at 2.0 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke or dust in Tucson today?
In June and early July, check the mountains. Fires in the Santa Catalinas have twice put Tucson under weeks of smoke — the Aspen Fire in 2003, which burned 84,750 acres, and the Bighorn Fire in 2020, which burned 119,987 — and the Rincons and Santa Ritas carry the same risk. From late June through September the more likely answer is dust: monsoon outflows lift walls of it, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, as on 20 June 2024 when a haboob formed over New Mexico and west Texas and pushed Tucson's PM10 briefly into the unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups range. Dust events rise and fall fast. Smoke tends to linger.
Is Tucson's air better than Phoenix's?
By the numbers, yes. The University of Arizona's MAP Dashboard recorded 33.7 per cent Good air quality days for Tucson in 2025, against 6.6 per cent for Phoenix, and the American Lung Association's 2026 report ranks Tucson-Nogales 41st worst in the country for ozone while Phoenix-Mesa sits fourth. Pima County meets all federal standards except in the Rillito area northwest of the city, still nonattainment for PM10. That does not mean Tucson has no bad days — 2025 still had 1.6 per cent of days rated unhealthy for sensitive groups and another 0.3 per cent very unhealthy or hazardous.
When is Tucson's air usually worst?
Two windows. Fire season runs from roughly May into early July, before the monsoon breaks — the Bighorn Fire started on 5 June 2020 and was not out until 23 July. Then the monsoon itself, June through September, brings the dust. Ozone is a smaller but real concern; Pima County notes that ozone standards were exceeded several times during the 2018 and 2020 ozone seasons. Winter is generally the calmer part of the year here, which is the reverse of how it works in Phoenix.
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 Tucson, 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 Tucson
We watch Tucson'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.