Texas Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 6 Texas cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Texas
Smoke risk across Texas concentrates in the summer months, driven by long-range transport from fires hundreds of miles away.
The 6 cities tracked here span roughly 657 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Houston 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.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Texas is New Orleans, LA, about 318 miles east of Houston. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Texas's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Oklahoma City, OK (414 mi north) and Memphis, TN (490 mi northeast) — useful second opinions when Texas's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Texas is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 6 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.