Air Quality in Vancouver, Washington — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Vancouver — with free alerts the moment smoke moves down the Gorge.
AQI 19 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Vancouver, Washington is AQI 19 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 16 to 54. 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 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 Camas, Washougal, Battle Ground, Ridgefield. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Vancouver
The sensors Canairy reads in Vancouver are 38 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 mi NNE | 25 | Good |
| 3.4 mi SSW | 16 | Good |
| 4.2 mi ENE | 19 | Good |
| 4.5 mi SSE | 19 | Good |
| 4.5 mi E | 54 | Moderate |
Vancouver sits on the north bank of the Columbia River in Clark County, directly across from Portland, and it shares that metro's air whether it wants to or not. The difference is who watches it: the Southwest Clean Air Agency runs the monitors on this side, and on an ordinary summer afternoon they read Good. Vancouver's air problems are episodic rather than daily, and there are three of them — wildfire smoke in late summer and early fall, wood smoke on cold still winter nights, and the Columbia River Gorge, the only major gap in the Cascades in either state, which opens at the city's eastern doorstep and funnels east wind, weather and smoke straight down the corridor.
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.
September 2020 is the week people here still measure against
The Labor Day fires put Southwest Washington under some of the worst air in the state's monitoring record. Between September 12 and 17, every single air quality monitor in Washington recorded particulate pollution above the federal 24-hour standard — the most days that Washington's PM2.5 monitors have recorded hazardous air going back to 2000, with most of the state seeing at least five consecutive days of very unhealthy or hazardous conditions.
Southwest Washington and Clark County were named among the worst-affected regions, and the Columbia River Gorge had the dirtiest air in the state. The smoke came from the Oregon fires — Lionshead, Beachie Creek and Riverside, roughly half a million acres between them — plus Big Hollow and others on the Washington side. Rain on the 17th began to clear it and the event ended around the 21st.
The Gorge is Vancouver's weather machine
The Columbia River Gorge is the only major gap through the Cascades in Oregon or Washington, and when high pressure builds east of the mountains the air accelerates through it. Easterly gorge flow is the local signature: research published in Weather and Forecasting found that at least 56 percent of annual snowfall, 70 percent of days with snowfall and 90 percent of days with freezing rain at Portland International Airport coincide with it.
The same corridor delivers smoke. On September 2, 2017, fireworks thrown into Eagle Creek Canyon during an active burn ban started the Eagle Creek Fire. It burned about 50,000 acres, closed Interstate 84 for weeks, jumped the Columbia into Washington near Archer Mountain, and on September 4 and 5 dropped up to an inch of ash on the Portland and Vancouver metro, pushing air quality to unhealthy and closing schools. It was not declared contained until November 30.
Fires burn on this side too, and winter is a different pollutant
In October 2022 the Nakia Creek Fire started on Larch Mountain northeast of Camas, about twenty miles from downtown Vancouver. It sat at around 150 acres for a week, then ran to roughly 2,000 acres in a matter of hours under high wind and low humidity. Nearly 3,000 homes went under evacuation orders and air quality reached unhealthy levels in parts of Clark County.
Winter is a different story entirely. The Southwest Clean Air Agency runs a wood smoke reduction program across Vancouver, Battle Ground, Camas, Washougal, Ridgefield, La Center and Woodland, because in much of Washington wintertime wood burning is the single largest source of fine particle pollution — ahead of vehicles and industry. Incomplete combustion puts carbon monoxide, benzene and formaldehyde into the smoke along with the particles.
Vancouver air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Vancouver right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 6:20 PM PDT, the air quality in Vancouver, Washington is AQI 19 — Good — with PM2.5 at 3.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Vancouver, WA today?
In late summer and early fall, usually wildfire smoke — from Oregon across the river, from the Cascades, or from a fire on the Washington side like Nakia Creek in 2022. Check which way the wind is coming from: an east wind out of the Columbia River Gorge behaves very differently from a north or west flow. In winter, smoke on a cold still night is far more likely to be residential wood burning trapped under an inversion, which is why the local agency issues burn bans.
Is this the same as Vancouver, BC?
No. This page is Vancouver, Washington — Clark County, on the north bank of the Columbia River directly across from Portland, Oregon. Vancouver, British Columbia is a different city about three hundred miles north in Canada, in a different airshed with a different agency watching it. Canairy has a separate page for that one.
Does Portland's air affect Vancouver?
Yes — the river is a state line, not an air barrier, and Vancouver is part of the Portland metropolitan area. Smoke, inversions and stagnant-air episodes generally cover both sides at once. What differs is who measures and regulates it: in Clark County that is the Southwest Clean Air Agency and Washington's Department of Ecology, so alerts, burn bans and monitor data come from Washington sources.
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 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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