New Mexico Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 New Mexico cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in New Mexico
Smoke risk across New Mexico concentrates in July through September, driven by fires across the northern Rockies and the Great Basin, with terrain that traps smoke overnight and clears it by afternoon.
The 3 cities tracked here span roughly 232 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Albuquerque 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 763,449 people across the 3 New Mexico cities we track, about 74% live in the Albuquerque area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in New Mexico should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside New Mexico is El Paso, TX, about 229 miles south of Albuquerque. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, New Mexico's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Colorado Springs, CO (279 mi north) and Flagstaff, AZ (282 mi west) — useful second opinions when New Mexico's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
New Mexico 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.
Readers in New Mexico during smoke season: our keep-smoke-out guide and the $70 Corsi-Rosenthal box cover the indoor side; the Can I go outside? tool answers the outdoor question for the current AQI.