Idaho Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 Idaho cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Idaho
Smoke risk across Idaho concentrates in mid-July through September, driven by regional fires plus smoke drawn down from British Columbia, which can hold for days once it settles into a valley.
The 3 cities tracked here span roughly 289 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Boise does not describe the whole state during a plume — check the city nearest you rather than assuming the largest one is representative.
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.
Of the 355,920 people across the 3 Idaho cities we track, about 66% live in the Boise area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Idaho should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Idaho is Missoula, MT, about 250 miles northeast of Boise. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Idaho's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Bend, OR (257 mi west) and Ogden, UT (268 mi southeast) — useful second opinions when Idaho's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Idaho is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 3 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.
Readers in Idaho during smoke season: our keep-smoke-out guide and the $70 Corsi-Rosenthal box cover the indoor side; the Can I go outside? tool answers the outdoor question for the current AQI.