It Is Once Again Smoke Season

By Dave Levitan | July 14, 2025 | 8:30am

Photo via MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC/Wikimedia Commons

Climate wildfires

In the middle of the day on Saturday this past weekend, almost all of Minnesota was home to an Air Quality Index of above 100, deemed “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” with most of it exceeding 150, which dispenses with the qualifier and just calls itself “unhealthy” air. In some spots in the northern part of the state, as well as across North Dakota and across the border in Canada, it reached across 200 into “very unhealthy” territory.

The culprit, like every summer now, was wildfire. In this case, the fires were burning relatively far to the north in Canada, and sending vast smoke plumes south and east into the US. By Monday morning, the plumes seen swirling across satellite imagery above had shifted or cleared for most of those northern plains states, but they weren’t sparing the population centers just yet: a monitor in downtown Toronto showed an AQI of 293, at the upper end of “very unhealthy” and bordering on the highest possible category, “hazardous.” That gave Canada’s largest city the second-worst air of any city in the world, just behind Baghdad and just ahead of Kinshasa.

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The National Weather Service has blanketed northern states with air quality alerts, persisting through the weekend. On Monday those alerts covered northern Minnesota along with the entirety of Wisconsin and Michigan. “It is recommended that, when possible, you avoid strenuous outdoor activities, especially those with heart disease and respiratory diseases like asthma,” the NWS said.

The US’s National Interagency Fire Center puts the current “National Preparedness Level” at 4 out of 5, “signaling high fire activity and significant demand for firefighting resources across the country.” Seven new “large wildfires” were reported just on Sunday alone; almost 2.5 million acres in the US have burned so far this year. Red flag warnings indicating fire weather were in place from the NWS in much of Washington State, with watches covering parts of other western areas. Per the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, huge swaths of our northern neighbor are currently at “high” or “very high” fire danger, with some pockets of “extreme” peppered in for good measure.

This is just How Things Are Now. Last year it started a bit earlier; I wrote in May 2024 about Minneapolis having the seventh-worst air quality in the world thanks to British Columbia wildfires. “This happened last year too, of course,” is a line from that post, but also this one, or the one next year.