Air Quality in Winnipeg, Manitoba — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Winnipeg — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 43 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Winnipeg, Manitoba is AQI 43 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 7.7 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 32 to 55. 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 Winnipeg: 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 Winnipeg and Headingley, East St. Paul, West St. Paul, Selkirk. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Winnipeg
The sensors Canairy reads in Winnipeg are 23 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 1.4 mi SE | 51 | Moderate |
| 2.6 mi NE | 36 | Good |
| 2.7 mi SW | 43 | Good |
| 7.2 mi WSW | 32 | Good |
| 8.1 mi SSW | 55 | Moderate |
Manitoba's own government describes the province's air as generally good, and outside of a few weeks a year that is accurate. Then came 2025. By the start of August, Winnipeg had logged 306 smoke hours, already past the 304 hours recorded across all of 1961, in a record that Environment and Climate Change Canada has kept since 1953. July alone accounted for 189 of them, the smokiest single month the city has on file, beating the 163 hours set in August 1961. Christy Climenhaga of Environment and Climate Change Canada laid the comparison out directly: the records in Winnipeg go back to 1953, and this year already beats the previous record of 304 hours set in 1961.
What Canairy does for Winnipeg
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Winnipeg: 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 Winnipeg or across the country, on one screen.
The summer of 2025 broke a record that had stood since 1961
The fire season behind it was the province's worst in about three decades. Manitoba burned more than 1.5 million hectares in 2025 against a long-term average below 400,000. A provincewide state of emergency was declared on 28 May with more than 17,000 people evacuated, and a second one followed in July as fires flared again; by 8 July, 98 fires were burning in the province with 16 of them listed as out of control. Two people died in the fire at Lac du Bonnet.
In Winnipeg the effect was measurable rather than atmospheric. On the worst August days the AQHI read 10+ across Manitoba, PM2.5 peaked in the range of 250 to 260 micrograms per cubic metre and touched about 280 overnight, and IQAir rated Winnipeg at 166, worse at that moment than New Delhi, Toronto or Beijing. Chris Pascoe, an associate professor at the University of Manitoba, offered the comparison that stuck locally: being outside for an hour in that smoke was equivalent to smoking three to four cigarettes.
From August to November, the smoke is often stubble
Manitoba runs a Crop Residue Burning Program from 1 August to 15 November, and the municipalities where a permit is required are exactly the ring of farmland around Winnipeg: Rosser, Headingley, St. François Xavier, Cartier, Macdonald, Ritchot, Taché, Springfield, East St. Paul and West St. Paul. That is not a coincidence. The province is explicit that smoke from burning crop residues affects people's health, road safety and the environment, and the whole point of the program is to keep it from settling over the city.
It works on a daily authorisation. By 11 a.m. each day the province issues a notice saying whether burning is allowed, when it can start, when fires must be out, and whether a permit is needed, and farmers can check it by phone or online. Burning inside Winnipeg's own boundaries needs a special permit from the Fire Prevention Branch in person at 185 King Street. On an autumn evening when the horizon goes brown and it is far too late in the year for a forest fire, this is usually the explanation.
Two provincial monitors for the whole city
Manitoba has five permanent air monitoring stations in total. Two of them are in Winnipeg, at 65 Ellen Street and 299 Scotia Street, with a temporary station at Kavanagh Park; the other three cover Brandon, Flin Flon and Thompson. The equipment is standard across jurisdictions and supplied by Environment and Climate Change Canada, and it reports hourly. Manitoba's own air quality standard for fine particulate matter is 30 micrograms per cubic metre averaged over 24 hours, and its ground-level ozone objective is 65 parts per billion over eight hours.
The province's summary of its own situation is worth reading plainly: Manitoba generally has good air quality, and poorer air tends to occur because of exceptional events such as wildfire smoke, and transboundary pollutants from south of the border or from other provinces, with localised issues such as stubble burning or building fires affecting monitors that happen to be near the fire. That last clause is the useful one. Two downtown-ish monitors will tell you about the airmass over the city. They will not tell you what is happening in St. Vital or Transcona while a field burns upwind, which is what the sensors on the map below are for.
Winnipeg air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Winnipeg right now?
As of September 11, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Winnipeg, Manitoba is AQI 43 — Good — with PM2.5 at 7.7 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Winnipeg today?
In summer it is wildfire smoke, usually from fires in northern Manitoba, northwestern Ontario or Saskatchewan, blown in on the prevailing wind rather than burning anywhere near the city. Manitoba's provincial monitoring program names wildfire smoke and transboundary pollution as the main reasons its air quality drops at all. From August into November there is a second possibility: crop residue burning in the farmland ringing the city, which the province authorises day by day. If the sky is hazy in October and no fire is in the news, stubble is the likely answer.
Canada reports the AQHI, so why does this page show a different number?
Environment and Climate Change Canada publishes the Air Quality Health Index, a 1 to 10+ scale built from three pollutants measured together: fine particulate matter, ground-level ozone and nitrogen dioxide. PurpleAir sensors measure fine particulate matter only, so an AQHI cannot honestly be calculated from them. This page shows the US EPA AQI instead, which is derived from PM2.5 directly and is what most air quality apps use. It is not an AQHI and Canairy does not present it as one. For the official AQHI for Winnipeg, Environment Canada and the Manitoba Air Quality Program are the sources.
Is farm stubble burning around Winnipeg allowed?
Yes, but it is controlled. Manitoba's Crop Residue Burning Program runs from 1 August to 15 November, and in the ten municipalities surrounding Winnipeg, including Headingley, Springfield, Ritchot, Macdonald, East St. Paul and West St. Paul, a permit is required. The province issues a daily authorisation by 11 a.m. that says whether burning can go ahead, when it can start and when fires must be out, based on how well smoke will disperse that day. Burning within Winnipeg city limits needs a separate permit from the Fire Prevention Branch.
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 Winnipeg, 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 Winnipeg
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