North Dakota Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 North Dakota city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in North Dakota
Smoke risk across North Dakota concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception.
We currently track one city in North Dakota. 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 125,990 people we track in North Dakota are all in the Fargo area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of North Dakota, 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 North Dakota is Minneapolis, MN, about 212 miles southeast of Fargo. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, North Dakota's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in St. Paul, MN (219 mi southeast) and Duluth, MN (221 mi east) — useful second opinions when North Dakota's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Fargo coverage
Fargo is one of the North Dakota cities we track, with a population of about 125,990, in Cass County.
Smoke risk here concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception. Outside that window an elevated reading in Fargo 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.