Utah Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 Utah cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Utah
Smoke risk across Utah concentrates in July through September, driven by fires across the northern Rockies and the Great Basin, with terrain that traps smoke overnight and clears it by afternoon.
The 3 cities tracked here are within about 68 miles of each other, so they usually share an air mass and move together. A large gap between two of them generally means a plume edge is passing between them.
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 402,206 people across the 3 Utah cities we track, about 50% live in the Salt Lake City area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Utah should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Utah is Idaho Falls, ID, about 189 miles north of Salt Lake City. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Utah's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Grand Junction, CO (210 mi southeast) and Boise, ID (299 mi northwest) — useful second opinions when Utah's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Tracking fires themselves, not just the smoke? Our Utah fire map guide lists the official state and federal incident maps and what each one is authoritative for.
Utah is one of the more closely watched states in our national coverage — we track 3 cities here, more than most states — so intra-state differences are visible rather than averaged away.
Readers in Utah during smoke season: our keep-smoke-out guide and the $70 Corsi-Rosenthal box cover the indoor side; the Can I go outside? tool answers the outdoor question for the current AQI.