Minnesota Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 4 Minnesota cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Minnesota
Smoke risk across Minnesota concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception.
The 4 cities tracked here span roughly 191 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Minneapolis 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.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Minnesota is Sioux Falls, SD, about 196 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Minnesota's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Fargo, ND (216 mi northwest) and Madison, WI (230 mi southeast) — useful second opinions when Minnesota's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Minnesota is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 4 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.