Ohio Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 Ohio cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Ohio
Smoke risk across Ohio concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away.
The 3 cities tracked here span roughly 165 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Columbus 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 1,587,689 people across the 3 Ohio cities we track, about 57% live in the Columbus area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Ohio should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Ohio is Pittsburgh, PA, about 162 miles east of Columbus. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Ohio's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Detroit, MI (164 mi north) and Indianapolis, IN (168 mi west) — useful second opinions when Ohio's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Ohio 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.