South Dakota Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 South Dakota city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in South Dakota
Smoke risk across South Dakota concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception.
We currently track one city in South Dakota. 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 192,517 people we track in South Dakota are all in the Sioux Falls area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of South Dakota, 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 South Dakota is Omaha, NE, about 163 miles south of Sioux Falls. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, South Dakota's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Minneapolis, MN (200 mi northeast) and Des Moines, IA (206 mi southeast) — useful second opinions when South Dakota's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Sioux Falls coverage
Sioux Falls is one of the South Dakota cities we track, with a population of about 192,517, in Minnehaha County.
Smoke risk here concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception. Outside that window an elevated reading in Sioux Falls 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.