Air Quality in Wichita, Kansas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Wichita — with free alerts when spring smoke or summer ozone push the air into unhealthy territory.
AQI 67 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Wichita, Kansas is AQI 67 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 17.7 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.2 times 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 Wichita: 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 Wichita and Derby, Andover, Haysville, Park City. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Wichita's air is Good or Moderate most of the year, but two very different stretches change that. In late March and April, ranchers across the Flint Hills just east of the city burn hundreds of thousands of acres of tallgrass prairie to keep it healthy for cattle grazing, and when the wind comes out of the east that smoke settles right over the metro. Then, from March through October, the city runs its own separate ozone season — hot, still summer afternoons cook vehicle exhaust into ground-level ozone that can push the AQI into unhealthy territory for people with asthma, even on a day with clear blue skies.
What Canairy does for Wichita
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Wichita: 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 Wichita or across the country, on one screen.
Flint Hills burning is a real spring event, not a rumor
Each year in late March and into April, ranchers across the Flint Hills — the belt of rocky, unplowed tallgrass prairie that runs along Wichita's eastern edge and holds the largest remaining stretch of tallgrass prairie in North America — deliberately burn large sections of it. The fire clears dead grass, knocks back invasive trees, and makes the new growth better cattle forage. Wichita sits close enough to the western edge of that same prairie that when the wind blows from the east, smoke from those burns drifts straight into the city rather than staying out in open country.
The state takes this seriously enough to run a dedicated Flint Hills Smoke Management Plan through KDHE, with a daily forecast map at ksfire.org that shows land managers where their smoke is likely to land on a given day. It doesn't always work out — the Wichita Eagle and KSN have both reported air quality advisories covering central and eastern Kansas during peak burning weeks, with KDHE urging people to limit outdoor activity while burning-driven pollutant levels are elevated across the region.
Wichita runs its own ozone season, March through October
Unlike the spring smoke, ozone is a summer, sunny-day problem — vehicle exhaust and other emissions cook into ground-level ozone in strong heat and light, and Wichita's ozone season officially runs March 1 through October 31. The city's Ozone Alerts program, run out of wichita.gov, covers the whole Wichita metro area — Sedgwick, Butler, Harvey, and Sumner counties — and is triggered by a mix of high heat, ozone carried over from the day before, high ozone arriving from upwind, and stagnant wind conditions that let it build up instead of clearing out.
The city's Be Air Aware campaign, a joint effort with the EPA and KDHE, asks residents to do specific things on alert days: carpool or take the bus, refuel after 6pm, skip the gas mower, cut down on idling, and put off anything involving paint or solvent fumes until the alert passes. It's a voluntary program rather than a shutdown order, but its existence is a sign of how often summer heat here actually pushes ozone into a range worth planning around.
Spring pollen compounds the problem
The same spring stretch that brings Flint Hills smoke also brings the country's toughest allergy season by at least one measure: the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America's 2023 Allergy Capitals report ranked Wichita the single hardest U.S. city to live in with pollen allergies, giving it a perfect score of 100 against a national average of 71.49 — and Kansas.com reported it was the second year running Wichita had topped the list. Tree and grass pollen off the surrounding plains and pastureland drives most of that score.
Pollen and PM2.5 are measured differently and Canairy's numbers are about particle pollution, not pollen counts — but the timing overlap matters. Someone with asthma or seasonal allergies in Wichita can be dealing with high pollen, wafting field-burning smoke, and the season's first warm-weather ozone spikes all in the same few weeks, which is exactly the stretch worth watching your saved locations most closely.
Wichita air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Wichita right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 3:01 PM CDT, the air quality in Wichita, Kansas is AQI 67 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 17.7 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why does Wichita smell smoky in late March and April?
That's Flint Hills prescribed burning — ranchers across the tallgrass prairie just east of the city set fire to hundreds of thousands of acres each spring to keep it healthy for grazing. When the wind blows from the east, that smoke drifts into Wichita, and KDHE has issued air quality advisories for central and eastern Kansas during peak burning weeks.
Does Wichita have a summer ozone problem?
Yes. The city runs an official Ozone Alerts program from March 1 through October 31, covering the whole Wichita metro area. Alerts go out when heat, stagnant wind, and vehicle emissions combine to push ground-level ozone into unhealthy territory, and the city's Be Air Aware campaign asks residents to carpool, refuel after 6pm, and cut back on driving on those days.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Wichita, 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 Wichita
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