Missouri Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 2 Missouri cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Missouri
Smoke risk across Missouri concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away.
The 2 cities tracked here span roughly 235 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Kansas City 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 809,668 people across the 2 Missouri cities we track, about 63% live in the Kansas City area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Missouri should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Missouri is Omaha, NE, about 166 miles northwest of Kansas City. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Missouri's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Wichita, KS (177 mi southwest) and Des Moines, IA (179 mi north) — useful second opinions when Missouri's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Missouri is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 2 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.