North Carolina Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 2 North Carolina cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in North Carolina
Smoke risk across North Carolina 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.
The 2 cities tracked here span roughly 124 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Charlotte 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 1,342,244 people across the 2 North Carolina cities we track, about 65% live in the Charlotte area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in North Carolina should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside North Carolina is Atlanta, GA, about 224 miles southwest of Charlotte. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, North Carolina's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Washington, DC (332 mi northeast) and Cincinnati, OH (338 mi northwest) — useful second opinions when North Carolina's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
North Carolina 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.