Louisiana Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Louisiana city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Louisiana
Smoke risk across Louisiana concentrates in spring, and again in autumn, driven by prescribed burns and local brush fires more often than distant wildfire, which makes the timing here unlike the West's.
We currently track one city in Louisiana. 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 383,997 people we track in Louisiana are all in the New Orleans area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Louisiana, 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 Louisiana is Houston, TX, about 317 miles west of New Orleans. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Louisiana's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Memphis, TN (359 mi north) and Atlanta, GA (429 mi northeast) — useful second opinions when Louisiana's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our New Orleans coverage
New Orleans is one of the Louisiana cities we track, with a population of about 383,997, in Orleans 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 New Orleans 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 spring, and again in autumn, driven by prescribed burns and local brush fires more often than distant wildfire, which makes the timing here unlike the West's. Outside that window an elevated reading in New Orleans 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.