Iowa Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Iowa city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Iowa
Smoke risk across Iowa concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception.
We currently track one city in Iowa. 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 214,133 people we track in Iowa are all in the Des Moines area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Iowa, 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 Iowa is Omaha, NE, about 121 miles west of Des Moines. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Iowa's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Rochester, MN (177 mi north) and Kansas City, MO (179 mi south) — useful second opinions when Iowa's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Des Moines coverage
Des Moines is one of the Iowa cities we track, with a population of about 214,133, in Polk County.
Smoke risk here concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception. Outside that window an elevated reading in Des Moines 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.