Nevada Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 Nevada cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Nevada
Smoke risk across Nevada 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 255 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Las Vegas 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 964,707 people across the 3 Nevada cities we track, about 67% live in the Las Vegas area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Nevada should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Nevada is Flagstaff, AZ, about 206 miles east of Las Vegas. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Nevada's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Bakersfield, CA (223 mi west) and Los Angeles, CA (226 mi southwest) — useful second opinions when Nevada's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Tracking fires themselves, not just the smoke? Our Nevada fire map guide lists the official state and federal incident maps and what each one is authoritative for.
Nevada 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 Nevada 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.