Pennsylvania Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 2 Pennsylvania cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Pennsylvania
Smoke risk across Pennsylvania 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 2 cities tracked here span roughly 255 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Philadelphia 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 1,906,768 people across the 2 Pennsylvania cities we track, about 84% live in the Philadelphia area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Pennsylvania should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Pennsylvania is Wilmington, DE, about 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Pennsylvania's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Trenton, NJ (29 mi northeast) and Newark, NJ (75 mi northeast) — useful second opinions when Pennsylvania's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Pennsylvania is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 2 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.