Wyoming Air Quality & Wildfire Smoke
Live AQI for 1 Wyoming city, plus statewide air-quality alerts. Data from AirNow (U.S. EPA).
Wildfire smoke in Wyoming
Smoke risk across Wyoming 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.
We currently track one city in Wyoming. 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 65,132 people we track in Wyoming are all in the Cheyenne area, so this page is effectively that metro's page with a wider lens. For the rest of Wyoming, 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 Wyoming is Fort Collins, CO, about 41 miles south of Cheyenne. Smoke does not stop at state lines — when a plume covers that city's monitors, Wyoming's edge nearest it is usually seeing the same air.
Our next-nearest tracked readings sit in Boulder, CO (81 mi south) and Denver, CO (97 mi south) — useful second opinions when Wyoming's own reading looks odd, and the honest picture of how coarse national smoke coverage is at this resolution.
About our Cheyenne coverage
Cheyenne is one of the Wyoming cities we track, with a population of about 65,132, in Laramie County.
In a city this size local sources contribute relatively little to PM2.5, so the AQI here tends to track transported smoke closely — when the number climbs, it is usually because smoke has arrived rather than because local conditions changed. That makes the reading a comparatively clean signal, but it also means it can move fast.
Smoke risk here 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. Outside that window an elevated reading in Cheyenne 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.
Readers in Wyoming 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.