PLUME.
← to the mapWhat this is
What’s burning, where the smoke is now, and whether you’ll be breathing it later — on one map. Twenty-five public data feeds, every forecast scored against what actually happened.
Wondering where it’s worst right now? The smoke hot spots page ranks cities by current and forecast smoke, each linking to its full forecast.
Not an official product of any agency listed below. For health guidance use AirNow.gov; in an emergency follow NWS and local authorities.
How to read it
Observed and forecast never blur. AirNow NowCast is the only thing labeled “observed” air quality. Model numbers are a forecast on the AQI scale, with the winning model named. Smoke-only models are “smoke on the AQI scale,” not certified AQI.
Satellites see presence, not breathability. Satellite-detected smoke and column haze describe what’s in the air column — smoke can ride thousands of feet overhead while surface air stays clean. The panel says which one your location is getting, and darkness or cloud reads as “no retrieval,” never as clear air.
Disagreement is information. Arrival windows show each model’s vote as a range, not a blended instant; forecast spread is shown per predicted quantity and is never called confidence.
Data sources
| HRRR-Smoke | NOAA GSL | hourly 3 km smoke forecast — the hero model, surface + column |
| FireWork | ECCC | Canadian smoke forecast — Canada’s smoke voter and map layer; over the US it yields to RRFS |
| AQM | NOAA EMC | total PM2.5 air-quality forecast |
| GEFS-Aerosols | NOAA | global outlook to +120 h, 3-hourly |
| GEOS-CF | NASA GMAO | global composition forecast — labeled research |
| CAMS | Copernicus | global total PM2.5 to +120 h — the hourly axis the forecast is built on |
| RRFS-SD | NOAA | next-gen 3 km smoke to +84 h — full headline member on the smoke family’s best verified record |
| HMS | NOAA OSPO | analyst-drawn daily smoke plumes |
| PurpleAir | USFS AirFire | EPA-corrected sensor readings — its own vocabulary, never merged into AirNow’s number |
| AirNow | EPA | observed NowCast PM2.5 — the only thing called “observed” air quality |
| NWS alerts | NOAA NWS | human-issued air-quality + red-flag warnings |
| FIRMS | NASA | VIIRS 375 m fire detections, three satellites |
| GOES ADP | NOAA NESDIS | satellite-detected smoke presence, ~10-min scans |
| GOES AOD | NOAA NESDIS | satellite-observed column haze (optical depth) |
| GOES GeoColor | NOAA STAR | true-color imagery, minutes behind the scan · 0.5 km zoom tiles via CIRA SLIDER |
| GOES FDC | NOAA NESDIS | fire detections + radiative power, 5-min |
| WFIGS + CWFIS | NIFC · NRCan | US + Canadian national incidents and perimeters |
| FIRIS | CAL FIRE | intel-flight fire perimeters, freshest per incident (California) |
| Provincial fire feeds | Canada | BCWS, Alberta Wildfire, Ontario AFFES, SOPFEU, Manitoba, NWT Fire, Yukon — each owns its province over the national feed |
Keeping score
Every forecast answers to observations, hourly, on three independent axes: model PM2.5 vs AirNow monitors (bucketed by forecast lead, so a fresh run is never averaged with an aging one), plume placement vs GOES satellite smoke detection (size-matched masks on sunlit pixels, so sensitivity differences don’t masquerade as position error), and the satellite haze product itself vs AERONET ground sun photometers. The sources popover on the map shows the running record — those numbers are earned, not asserted.
Credits
Data courtesy of NOAA (Open Data Dissemination, NWS, NESDIS, STAR, GSL, EMC), NASA (GMAO; fire detections from FIRMS, part of EOSDIS), Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the EPA and its AirNow partners, NIFC, CAL FIRE, the Canadian provincial and territorial fire agencies, CSU/CIRA (SLIDER imagery), and the AERONET principal investigators and site staff who establish and maintain the ground stations used for AOD verification.
City pages use place data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and the US Census Gazetteer. Location search and out-of-coverage forecasts by Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0); reverse geocoding by BigDataCloud. Maps rendered with MapLibre GL JS on CARTO basemaps, © OpenStreetMap contributors.