Air Quality in Tulsa, Oklahoma — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Tulsa — with free alerts when ozone season turns the air unhealthy.
AQI 46 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Tulsa, Oklahoma is AQI 46 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 8.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 44 to 47. 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 Tulsa: 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 Tulsa and Broken Arrow, Owasso, Bixby, Jenks. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Tulsa
The sensors Canairy reads in Tulsa agree right now — all 3 sit in the Good band, a 3-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.6 mi SSW | 47 | Good |
| 7.8 mi SSW | 46 | Good |
| 7.8 mi ESE | 44 | Good |
Tulsa's air is genuinely good most of the year — Oklahoma currently meets every federal air quality standard, Tulsa included. The real story here is narrower: hot, still summer afternoons that can push ground-level ozone into unhealthy territory, and the occasional visible plume from the refineries that line the Arkansas River in west Tulsa.
What Canairy does for Tulsa
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Tulsa: 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 Tulsa or across the country, on one screen.
Tulsa was once on the EPA's 'dirty air list' — then built the nation's first Ozone Alert Program
When Oklahoma started monitoring air quality in the 1980s, Tulsa turned up on the EPA's nonattainment list for ozone — the government's formal term for a dirty-air city. INCOG, the regional planning agency, pushed through a redesignation to attainment in 1990, just months before Congress passed the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments that would have made nonattainment status far harder to shake off.
The relief didn't last a full year. Ozone levels crept back up in 1991, so INCOG built the country's first Ozone Alert! Program in about two weeks that same summer — a voluntary system asking drivers, businesses, and industry to cut emissions on the days ozone was likely to spike. Heading into the 2025 season it was already in its 35th year, still run off the same tulsaairquality.com forecast page Tulsans check on summer mornings.
Ozone season runs roughly May through September, and it's a heat problem, not a smoke problem
Ground-level ozone forms when pollutants from tailpipes, power plants, and refineries react in strong sunlight, so Tulsa's worst air days aren't hazy or smoky — they're hot, bright, and still, often stacking up after a run of 90-degree-plus afternoons. Tulsa Area Air Quality, the site INCOG and its partners run, calls an Ozone Alert Day when forecasters expect the 8-hour ozone average to approach the federal standard, and it publishes the next day's call by early evening so people can plan around it.
The response leans on getting people out of their cars: MetroLink cuts bus and pass fares in half for the whole ozone season — May 23 through September 1 in the 2025 season — and the program's other asks are the ordinary ones, like carpooling, combining errands, and stopping at the pump's first click instead of topping off the tank. The math is simple: fewer VOCs in the air on a 95-degree afternoon means a lower ozone reading that evening.
West Tulsa's refineries are the other half of the story
Tulsa built its identity as the 'Oil Capital of the World,' and the refineries are still there. HF Sinclair, formerly HollyFrontier, runs an integrated refinery processing roughly 125,000 barrels of crude a day along the Arkansas River in west Tulsa, and routine flaring is a normal, permitted part of that operation — visible from a wide stretch of the city.
It isn't always routine. On the evening of December 16, 2024, an operational upset touched off a fire at the HF Sinclair refinery that sent thick black smoke over the west Tulsa skyline, visible to drivers along Riverside Drive before crews got it out. No evacuation was ordered and the company called it contained, but it's exactly the kind of sudden, localized event that one citywide AQI number can miss — which is why Canairy reads the sensors nearest the neighborhoods actually downwind, not just a single reading for the whole metro.
Tulsa air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Tulsa right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:25 AM CDT, the air quality in Tulsa, Oklahoma is AQI 46 — Good — with PM2.5 at 8.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Tulsa declare Ozone Alert Days in summer?
Ozone forms when emissions from vehicles, power plants, and refineries react in strong sunlight, and Tulsa's hot, still summer afternoons are exactly the conditions that let it build up. INCOG's Ozone Alert! Program — the first of its kind in the country when it launched in 1991 — forecasts these days each evening for the one ahead, and Canairy's live readings let you check whether today is actually shaping up that way rather than waiting on the forecast alone.
Does the West Tulsa refinery affect nearby air quality?
HF Sinclair's west Tulsa refinery runs routine flaring as a normal part of operations, and it has had at least one notable upset — a December 2024 fire that sent black smoke over the skyline. Routine flaring and rare incidents like that are local, not citywide, which is why it's worth watching a sensor near west Tulsa specifically rather than relying on one number for the whole metro.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Tulsa, 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 Tulsa
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