SmokeDar: America’s Smoke Radar. Wildfire smoke and air quality for the Midwest, New York City, Washington, D.C., Spokane, Boise, Bend, Santa Rosa and Calaveras County, California.
Your air right now
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Reading the air…
General risk, not medical advice. What to do · What that means
The Sky Log
Collect America
Next five days · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Heat and smoke, on the same row
low to high worst AQI expected, model forecast The day to watch is the one that is hot and smoky.
New
Tell me when the air goes bad
A push to this device when the observed AQI near you crosses your line, checked every 20 minutes against EPA AirNow monitors. Never a model guess, one alert per smoke event, and not an emergency alert system.
Quiet overnight (9pm to 7am your time), silent when the air recovers, off anytime right here. Alerts only fire on real monitor readings; if EPA stops reporting for your area, SmokeDar says so once rather than guessing. Or get updates by email instead.
On iPhone: Apple only allows web push for installed apps. Share → Add to Home Screen, open SmokeDar from the icon, and this card works. In a Safari tab, the email list is the way.
SmokeDar says
Nice flying!
You doused 0 fires
Top pilots · this week
- Loading…
Board resets every Monday. Defend your spot.
Smoke alerts when the air turns, smoke, not just fire. One click to leave, always.
Why this is happening
Something is burning upwind
Counting what is on fire upwind. The Canadian fire service takes a few seconds.
Biggest fires upwind of you
Fires nearest you
- Waiting on NIFC…
What this does and does not say. These are the fires burning upwind of you right now, with the area they have already burned. It is not proof that this exact haze came from that exact fire. Proving that needs back-trajectory modeling, which SmokeDar does not do. What it does show is the cause behind the pattern: when this much land is alight upwind and the wind points at you, the sky goes orange. The US list shows sizable active fires nearest to your location, with distance and direction; if none are near you, it shows the largest US fires instead, purely for scale.
Canadian perimeters and hotspots from the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (Natural Resources Canada). US incidents from NIFC. Both free and public.
Still being built
Know when SmokeDar gets better
This is new and it is going to change. Leave your email and I will tell you when something worth knowing lands: more cities sketched, sharper data, whatever you ask for next.
- Once a month at the very most, and only when there is something to say
- Never sold, never shared, never handed to an ad network
- One click to leave, and the link is in every message
No ads. No signup. Nothing sold.
It stays free if you help out
There is nothing to sell here and nobody paying for your attention, so the thing that keeps SmokeDar running is people chipping in. If it ever told you something worth knowing, like whether Saturday's game should move, consider a donation. A coffee genuinely covers a month of it.
The coffee goes to Ryan Tea, which is a name I answer to and also, it turns out, my Buy Me a Coffee handle.
Starting up…
The sky, the sun and the smoke are all drawn from a computer estimate (CAMS), refreshed hourly.
SmokeDar covers Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri, plus New York City, Washington, D.C., Spokane, Boise, Bend, Santa Rosa and Calaveras County, California, each window on its own 616-point grid refreshed hourly.
Smoke radar
–
Strongest return
–
Scanning…
Wind at the surface
–
–
Is it coming here?
–
–
How to read this
You are at the center, rings are distance, and the needle sweeps clockwise from north, painting smoke as it passes. Hover anywhere to read that spot. Tilt switches between the smoke aloft and the air at the surface, the way a real radar switches elevation.
What this is not. There is no beam. This is the modeled CAMS field in plan view, on a grid about 77 km across, so it cannot see a single fire or a street. It also cannot measure how fast the plume travels: at this resolution the field changes strength in place faster than it visibly moves, so any speed here would be invented. Timing comes from the hourly forecast instead.