Rhode Island Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Rhode Island city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Rhode Island
Smoke risk across Rhode Island 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.
We currently track one city in Rhode Island. Its reading is for that monitoring area only and should not be read as a statewide figure.
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.
The 190,934 people we track in Rhode Island are all in the Providence area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Rhode Island, the nearest tracked reading in a bordering state is usually the better proxy than a number from the opposite corner.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Rhode Island is Boston, MA, about 41 miles northeast of Providence. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Rhode Island's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Hartford, CT (65 mi west) and Albany, NY (133 mi northwest) — useful second opinions when Rhode Island's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Providence coverage
Providence is one of the Rhode Island cities we track, with a population of about 190,934, in Providence County.
Smoke risk here 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. Outside that window an elevated reading in Providence is more likely to be local — traffic, dust, or a temperature inversion holding everyday pollution near the ground — than wildfire smoke, and the dominant pollutant shown above is what tells the two apart.
For smoke preparation that applies anywhere — filtration, masks, a clean room — see our wildfire-smoke health guide and the clean-room setup.