New Jersey Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 New Jersey cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in New Jersey
Smoke risk across New Jersey concentrates in June through early August, driven by long-range transport from Quebec and Ontario, which arrives as a regional haze rather than a local plume.
The 3 cities tracked here are within about 36 miles of each other, so they usually share an air mass and move together. A large gap between two of them generally means a plume edge is passing between them.
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 New Jersey is New York, NY, about 9 miles east of Newark. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, New Jersey's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Philadelphia, PA (75 mi southwest) and Wilmington, DE (99 mi southwest) — useful second opinions when New Jersey's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
New Jersey is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 3 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.