Oregon Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 5 Oregon cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Oregon
Smoke risk across Oregon concentrates in mid-July through September, driven by regional fires plus smoke drawn down from British Columbia, which can hold for days once it settles into a valley.
The 5 cities tracked here span roughly 220 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Portland 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 1,189,694 people across the 5 Oregon cities we track, about 55% live in the Portland area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Oregon should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Oregon is Vancouver, WA, about 8 miles north of Portland. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Oregon's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Tacoma, WA (120 mi north) and Yakima, WA (129 mi northeast) — useful second opinions when Oregon'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 Oregon fire map guide lists the official state and federal incident maps and what each one is authoritative for.
Oregon 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.
Readers in Oregon 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.