Air Quality in Vancouver, BC — Live

Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Vancouver — with free alerts the moment smoke moves in.

Live Vancouver AQI from nearby PurpleAir sensors loads when this page opens in a browser, along with a live sensor map covering Vancouver and Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver, New Westminster.

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.

Canairy watches the sensors around your home, your kids' school, and everywhere else you care about, and tells you in plain English when the air changes enough to matter.

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?

This page shows the current AQI for Vancouver, calculated from PurpleAir sensors across the city and updated continuously. The map below shows every live sensor, so you can check the reading closest to your own neighborhood.

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 AQI level is unhealthy?

Under the US EPA scale, AQI 0–50 is Good and 51–100 is Moderate. From 101 the air is Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — kids, older adults, and people with asthma or heart conditions — and above 150 it's Unhealthy for everyone. Canairy translates these numbers into a plain-English verdict, like whether to close the windows or move a workout indoors.

Where does Canairy's Vancouver data come from?

Readings come from PurpleAir's network of laser particle sensors across Vancouver and nearby communities like Burnaby, Richmond, and North Vancouver, cross-referenced with government monitors and the Google Air Quality API. You can see every sensor behind your numbers on the live map — there's no black box.

Is Canairy free?

Yes. The Canairy app is free to download and includes live air quality for all your saved places, plain-English verdicts, and free push alerts when the air crosses your threshold. A paid plan adds extras like SMS text alerts.

Get Canairy free on Google Play.