TrailSmoke publishes a live smoke and air-quality forecast page for 12 states, each one built on the same map: NOAA HRRR-Smoke near-surface PM2.5 for the next 48 hours, active fires and perimeters from NIFC, and ground readings from EPA AirNow monitors. Every state page is listed below in alphabetical order, with the cities its map opens on and a note on what actually burns there.
The second half of this page covers the two state-level statistics people mix up constantly: how many fires a state gets, and how big they get. They rank almost opposite lists, and only the second one predicts smoke.
State smoke forecast pages
Sierra and Klamath conifer, coastal chaparral, and Central Valley grass all burn on different clocks, so the state has no single season. Autumn offshore winds drive the fastest-moving fires, and the Central Valley holds the resulting smoke longest.
Los Angeles · San Francisco · Sacramento · San Diego · Fresno · Redding
Local fire runs from the Front Range foothills into the San Juans, but a large share of Denver and Boulder smoke days are imported, arriving aloft from Pacific Northwest and California fires and mixing to the surface in the afternoon.
Denver · Colorado Springs · Fort Collins · Boulder · Grand Junction · Durango
Central Idaho holds some of the largest roadless country in the lower 48. Fires there run for weeks with no road to stop them, which is what pushes average fire size in the northern Rockies well above the national figure.
Boise · Idaho Falls · Coeur d'Alene · Pocatello · Twin Falls · Lewiston
Almost no wildfire of consequence starts in Illinois. Nearly every elevated PM2.5 day in Chicago, Rockford, and Peoria is transported smoke, usually Canadian, occasionally western.
Chicago · Aurora · Springfield · Peoria · Rockford · Naperville
The closest of these states to the Canadian boreal source region, and the only one with boreal fuel of its own in the Superior National Forest and Boundary Waters. Smoke often reaches Duluth hours before the Twin Cities.
Minneapolis · St. Paul · Duluth · Rochester · Bloomington · St. Cloud
Northern Rockies timber that peaks late, in August and September. Western Montana valleys are the classic case of smoke that arrives once and then sits, held under inversions for days after the flow aloft has already changed.
Billings · Missoula · Bozeman · Great Falls · Helena · Kalispell
Negligible local wildfire. New York smoke is a transport story, and the June 2023 and July 2026 events showed how far into hazardous AQI a Canadian plume can push a city a thousand miles from any fire.
New York City · Buffalo · Rochester · Albany · Syracuse · Binghamton
Two regimes in one state. Westside Cascade conifer produces rare but enormous fires under east wind, as in September 2020, while eastside rangeland burns more often and faster in cheatgrass.
Portland · Salem · Eugene · Bend · Medford · Klamath Falls
Local fire is small and mostly a spring leaf-litter problem. The smoke that closes schools and moves AQI into the orange comes from Canada on northerly flow.
Philadelphia · Pittsburgh · Allentown · Harrisburg · Erie · Scranton
Great Basin rangeland in the west and high-plateau timber in the east and south. Cheatgrass carries rangeland fire fast, and the Wasatch Front valleys trap whatever smoke reaches them.
Salt Lake City · Provo · Ogden · St. George · Logan · Park City
Eastern Washington shrub-steppe accounts for most of the acreage; westside Cascade timber accounts for the worst Puget Sound smoke days, usually under an east wind that also pushes British Columbia smoke south.
Seattle · Spokane · Tacoma · Vancouver · Yakima · Bellingham
Spring grass and marsh fires are the local pattern and rarely matter for air quality. The summer smoke that blankets Milwaukee and Madison rides down from Ontario and Manitoba.
Milwaukee · Madison · Green Bay · Kenosha · Appleton · Eau Claire
Any town in North America works on the main map, including states without a page yet. The state pages exist because most people search for smoke by state before they search for it by town.
Fire count and fire size are different numbers
A state can lead the country in ignitions and still barely register on a smoke map, because thousands of quarter-acre roadside fires produce almost no PM2.5. What fills a sky is a small number of fires that get large and stay lit for weeks. Acres burned per fire separates the two.
Across the 10 full seasons from 2016 to 2025, the United States averaged 63,405 wildfires and 7,054,337 acres a year, which works out to 111.3 acres per fire nationally. That national figure is steadier than either number it comes from, and it still swings by a factor of 3.6 between the largest and smallest years on record here:
| Year | Fires | Acres burned | Acres per fire |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 67,743 | 5,509,995 | 81.3 |
| 2017 | 71,499 | 10,026,086 | 140.2 |
| 2018 | 58,083 | 8,767,492 | 150.9 |
| 2019 | 50,477 | 4,664,364 | 92.4 |
| 2020 | 58,950 | 10,122,336 | 171.7 |
| 2021 | 58,985 | 7,125,643 | 120.8 |
| 2022 | 68,988 | 7,577,183 | 109.8 |
| 2023 | 56,580 | 2,693,910 | 47.6 |
| 2024 | 64,897 | 8,924,884 | 137.5 |
| 2025 | 77,850 | 5,131,474 | 65.9 |
| Average | 63,405 | 7,054,337 | 111.3 |
Year-end national totals from the National Interagency Fire Center. Acres per fire is derived.
2025 had the most fires of any year in the table (77,850) and finished well below average on acres. 2020 had fewer fires and burned 10,122,336 acres. 2023 is the clearest case: a normal count of fires, 47.6 acres each, and a quiet smoke year in the West that was still one of the worst smoke years on record in the East, because the fires that mattered were in Canada and are not in this table at all.
States that lead on fire count
Ignition counts track people and grass, not forest. Texas records more wildfires than any other state in most years, driven by grass and brush fires across a very large area with a long burning window. The Southeast, particularly Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Alabama, reports huge numbers of fires as well, most of them small, many of them escaped debris burns, and a large share extinguished inside a day. California posts high counts too, for the same population reason, but it belongs on the other list as well.
For smoke forecasting this ranking is close to useless. A state can sit near the top of it and never produce a plume that shows up on a regional map, because a fire that stays under a few acres releases very little PM2.5 and lofts none of it.
States that lead on acres per fire
This is the list that predicts smoke. Alaska is not close to the rest: it records comparatively few fires in a typical year and burns an average that runs more than an order of magnitude above the national figure of 111.3 acres, because boreal forest and tundra fires burn for weeks in country with no road, no crew, and no reason to stop them. A single Alaskan fire in an active year can exceed an entire season's acreage in most eastern states.
Behind Alaska, two patterns produce large fires for very different reasons. Great Basin rangeland in Nevada, southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and western Utah burns fast and wide in cheatgrass, so a single ignition can run tens of thousands of acres in a day. Northern Rockies and interior Northwest timber in Idaho, Montana, and eastern Washington burns slower but far longer, and it is the one that produces multi-week smoke. Grass acreage is over quickly; timber acreage smokes.
California appears near the top of both lists, which is why it dominates coverage. New Mexico and Arizona swing hard between years depending on the monsoon. The eastern and midwestern states with TrailSmoke pages, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, sit at the bottom of both lists and still see hazardous air, because their smoke is imported from Canada. Per-state year-end tables are published in the NIFC annual wildland fire statistics report.
Reading a state page
Each page opens on the state's largest metro with the 48-hour forecast preloaded, and the city buttons repoint the same map rather than loading a different one. Three things are worth doing on any of them:
- Scrub the timeline. The hour the shaded plume stops covering your town is your clearing time. If it never clears inside 48 hours, the honest answer is longer than two days.
- Switch models. HRRR-Smoke and ECCC FireWork are independent. In the eastern and midwestern states FireWork usually resolves Canadian sources better; when the two disagree anywhere, plan on the smokier one.
- Check a monitor. The nearest AirNow station is ground truth for right now, which is the one thing a forecast cannot give you.
TrailSmoke is not a health authority. During heavy smoke, follow guidance from AirNow and local officials.