New York Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 5 New York cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in New York
Smoke risk across New York 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 5 cities tracked here span roughly 263 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in New York 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 9,541,711 people across the 5 New York cities we track, about 92% live in the New York area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in New York should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside New York is Jersey City, NJ, about 4 miles west of New York. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, New York's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Newark, NJ (9 mi west) and Trenton, NJ (52 mi southwest) — useful second opinions when New York's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
New York is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 5 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.