Wisconsin Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 3 Wisconsin cities, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Wisconsin
Smoke risk across Wisconsin concentrates in June through August, driven by Canadian boreal fire smoke riding the jet stream south — increasingly a summer fixture rather than an exception.
The 3 cities tracked here span roughly 102 miles, which is far enough that they routinely sit in different air masses. A reading in Milwaukee 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 954,457 people across the 3 Wisconsin cities we track, about 60% live in the Milwaukee area — statewide guidance here leans heavily on what that metro's monitors report, and readers elsewhere in Wisconsin should weight their nearest city's page more heavily than the aggregate.
Cross-border check: the nearest city we track outside Wisconsin is Chicago, IL, about 81 miles south of Milwaukee. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Wisconsin's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Grand Rapids, MI (113 mi east) and Rochester, MN (240 mi west) — useful second opinions when Wisconsin's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
Wisconsin 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.