Minneapolis wildfire smoke forecast
The map above shows NOAA HRRR-Smoke near-surface PM2.5 for the next 48 hours, updated hourly, with active fires from NIFC and live AQI from EPA AirNow monitors. It opens over Minneapolis.
Minneapolis sits on flat ground with no terrain to trap or channel anything, which makes its smoke story unusually simple: whatever the wind brings, the city gets, and whatever the wind changes, the city loses. There is no inversion geometry and no local topographic escape, so elevation tricks that work in the mountain West are irrelevant here.
Where the smoke comes from
Canadian boreal fires in Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan supply nearly all of it, arriving on northwest flow. Minnesota is the closest large metro area to that fire belt, so smoke often reaches the Twin Cities a day or more before it reaches Chicago or the East Coast. Fires in the Boundary Waters contribute occasionally.
How long it lasts
Entirely synoptic. A wind shift or a frontal passage ends the episode and nothing else does. Because the source is a thousand miles away and the transport is broad, concentrations tend to be steadier hour to hour than in a valley city, which makes the multi-day outlook more useful than the hourly one.
Past smoke events
The summer of 2021 produced a record number of air quality alerts for the state, and June 2023 and the 2026 season both delivered multi-day episodes with AQI in the unhealthy range across the metro.
Running, riding, and trailheads
The Chain of Lakes, the Grand Rounds, and the Mississippi river trails are all at the same elevation as everything else, so there is nowhere local to go. The practical move is timing rather than location: these episodes usually have a clean edge that arrives at a forecastable hour.
Reading the map
Most of this smoke starts in Canada, so switch the map to the ECCC FireWork model, which resolves Canadian sources HRRR-Smoke can underplay. Compare the two with the layer toggle.
Near-surface is the product that maps to what you breathe and to AQI, not the high-altitude column that only tints the sunset. A sky that looks bad and a monitor that reads fine are usually both correct, and they are describing different layers of air.