Air Quality in Vancouver, British Columbia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Vancouver — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.
AQI 17 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Vancouver, British Columbia is AQI 17 — Good and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 3.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 17 to 33. 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 Vancouver: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a very low 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 Vancouver and Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver, New Westminster. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Vancouver
The sensors Canairy reads in Vancouver agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 16-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.6 mi WNW | 23 | Good |
| 1.3 mi ESE | 33 | Good |
| 2.0 mi SW | 17 | Good |
| 3.8 mi NNW | 17 | Good |
Ocean on one side, mountains on the other — most of the year Vancouver breathes some of the cleanest big-city air in North America. The exception arrives in late summer, when wildfire smoke from the BC Interior or from Washington and Oregon drifts in and can hold the whole region under an air quality advisory for days.
What Canairy does for Vancouver
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Vancouver: 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 Vancouver or across the country, on one screen.
Vancouver's smoke usually comes from somewhere else
The fires that foul Vancouver's air are rarely local. In 2018, smoke drifting in from Interior fires gave Metro Vancouver a record 22 days of air quality advisories, 18 of them for wildfire smoke, on the heels of 2017's unprecedented fire season. In September 2020 the smoke came from the other direction: fires in Washington and Oregon pushed Vancouver into the top three major cities in the world for worst air quality, with Environment Canada warning of a very high risk to health.
It keeps happening. In August 2023, smoke from the McDougall Creek fire near West Kelowna and other Interior blazes spread an advisory from the eastern Fraser Valley across all of Metro Vancouver. And in September 2025, after a mostly clear summer, smoke from fires near Hope and Harrison Lake, from Washington state, and from a new fire on Cypress Mountain in West Vancouver blanketed the Lower Mainland in a matter of days. The lesson locals learn quickly: the sky here can change on a wind shift, whatever the nearest fire map says.
The mountains and the sea breeze decide where smoke settles
Metro Vancouver sits at the mouth of the Lower Fraser Valley, an airshed walled in by the Coast Mountains to the north and open to the Pacific on the west. The daytime sea breeze that keeps the city itself comfortable also pushes pollutants steadily eastward up the valley, where the narrowing mountains trap them. That's why advisories so often hit Surrey, Langley, the Tri-Cities, and the Fraser Valley hardest while downtown and the west side stay a shade clearer.
The same geography works in reverse during a smoke event: once smoke fills the basin, the mountains hold it in place until the weather changes. A single regional number hides all of that — air over Kitsilano and air in Port Coquitlam can be genuinely different at the same hour, which is why Canairy reads the PurpleAir sensors nearest the places you actually saved instead of one citywide average.
In winter, the quiet source is wood smoke
When fire season ends, the region's biggest local source of fine particles is closer to home: smoke from residential wood burning is Metro Vancouver's largest single source of fine-particulate emissions, at roughly a quarter of the local total. On cold, still nights that smoke settles near the ground instead of dispersing.
It's a big enough problem that the regional district adopted a Residential Indoor Wood Burning Bylaw in 2020 — wood-burning fireplaces and stoves inside the urban area must now be registered, burning is restricted from mid-May to mid-September, and rebates encourage swapping old stoves for heat pumps or cleaner devices. On a calm winter evening, a sensor near your block will tell you what the neighborhood chimneys are doing long before your nose does.
Vancouver air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Vancouver right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 10:50 AM PDT, the air quality in Vancouver, British Columbia is AQI 17 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.0 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Vancouver get smoky in late summer?
July through September is wildfire season across the BC Interior and the US Pacific Northwest, and Vancouver sits downwind of both. Smoke from Interior fires drove a record 22 advisory days in 2018, and in September 2020 smoke from Washington and Oregon fires briefly made Vancouver's air among the worst of any major city in the world. Once smoke settles into the Lower Fraser Valley, the surrounding mountains can hold it there until the weather shifts.
Canada uses the AQHI — what scale does Canairy show?
Environment Canada reports air quality as the Air Quality Health Index, a 1-to-10+ scale of short-term health risk. Canairy shows the US EPA AQI, the 0-to-500 scale used by PurpleAir and most air-quality apps, so your Vancouver readings are directly comparable with cities anywhere. Both are built from the same underlying pollutant measurements — Canairy also translates the number into a plain-English verdict, so you don't need to memorize either scale.
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 Vancouver, 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 Vancouver
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