Hawaii Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Hawaii city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Hawaii
Smoke risk across Hawaii concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away.
We currently track one city in Hawaii. 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 350,964 people we track in Hawaii are all in the Honolulu area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Hawaii, the nearest tracked reading in a bordering state is usually the better proxy than a number from the opposite corner.
A coverage note, stated plainly: Hawaii sits outside the dense part of our national coverage. The nearest city we track is San Francisco, CA, about 2546 miles away — too far for its reading to say anything about Hawaii's air. The live AQI above comes from the monitoring network nearest Honolulu itself, which is the honest resolution we can offer; treat any third-party "statewide" smoke map that claims finer detail with the skepticism it has earned.
About our Honolulu coverage
Honolulu is one of the Hawaii cities we track, with a population of about 350,964, in Honolulu County.
A city this size carries its own year-round PM2.5 baseline from traffic, construction and industry, so wildfire smoke here arrives on top of an existing load rather than against clean background air. That matters for reading the number: a moderate AQI in Honolulu on a smoke-free week is normal, and the same AQI during a plume means considerably more smoke than it would somewhere with a lower floor.
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 Honolulu 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.