Tennessee Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 2 Tennessee cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Tennessee
Smoke risk across Tennessee concentrates in spring, and again in autumn, driven by prescribed burns and local brush fires more often than distant wildfire, which makes the timing here unlike the West's.
The 2 cities tracked here span roughly 183 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Nashville 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 1,322,551 people across the 2 Tennessee cities we track, about 52% live in the Nashville area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Tennessee should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Tennessee is Louisville, KY, about 155 miles north of Nashville. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Tennessee's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Atlanta, GA (213 mi southeast) and Cincinnati, OH (239 mi northeast) — useful second opinions when Tennessee's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Tennessee 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.