Nebraska Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Nebraska city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Nebraska
Smoke risk across Nebraska 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 Nebraska. 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 486,051 people we track in Nebraska are all in the Omaha area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Nebraska, 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 Nebraska is Des Moines, IA, about 122 miles east of Omaha. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Nebraska's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Sioux Falls, SD (163 mi north) and Kansas City, MO (165 mi southeast) — useful second opinions when Nebraska's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Omaha coverage
Omaha is one of the Nebraska cities we track, with a population of about 486,051, in Douglas 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 Omaha 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 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 Omaha 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.
Tracking fires themselves, not just the smoke? Our Nebraska fire map guide lists the official state and federal incident maps and what each one is authoritative for.
For smoke preparation that applies anywhere — filtration, masks, a clean room — see our wildfire-smoke health guide and the clean-room setup.