Delaware Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Delaware city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Delaware
Smoke risk across Delaware concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away.
We currently track one city in Delaware. Its reading is for that monitoring area only and should not be read as a statewide figure.
Each city page below shows AirNow's reported AQI on the 2024 EPA breakpoints, with the reporting monitor and the observation time — see how we calculate AQI. Statewide watches and warnings come from the National Weather Service and appear at the top of this page when active.
The 70,898 people we track in Delaware are all in the Wilmington area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Delaware, the nearest tracked reading in a bordering state is usually the better proxy than a number from the opposite corner.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Delaware is Philadelphia, PA, about 25 miles northeast of Wilmington. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Delaware's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Trenton, NJ (54 mi northeast) and Baltimore, MD (65 mi southwest) — useful second opinions when Delaware's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Wilmington coverage
Wilmington is one of the Delaware cities we track, with a population of about 70,898, in New Castle County.
In a city this size local sources contribute relatively little to PM2.5, so the AQI here tends to track transported smoke closely — when the number climbs, it is usually because smoke has arrived rather than because local conditions changed. That makes the reading a comparatively clean signal, but it also means it can move fast.
Smoke risk here concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away. Outside that window an elevated reading in Wilmington is more likely to be local — traffic, dust, or a temperature inversion holding everyday pollution near the ground — than wildfire smoke, and the dominant pollutant shown above is what tells the two apart.
For smoke preparation that applies anywhere — filtration, masks, a clean room — see our wildfire-smoke health guide and the clean-room setup.