Indiana Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Indiana city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Indiana
Smoke risk across Indiana concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away.
We currently track one city in Indiana. 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 887,642 people we track in Indiana are all in the Indianapolis area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Indiana, 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 Indiana is Cincinnati, OH, about 99 miles southeast of Indianapolis. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Indiana's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Louisville, KY (107 mi south) and Chicago, IL (165 mi northwest) — useful second opinions when Indiana's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Indianapolis coverage
Indianapolis is one of the Indiana cities we track, with a population of about 887,642, in Marion 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 Indianapolis 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 Indianapolis 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.