Air Quality
Air quality
Current AQI and hourly smoke and PM2.5 forecasts out to 120 hours for the contiguous US.
Overview
Air quality is covered from two angles: observed AQI from the nearest US monitoring station, and a modelled smoke forecast that fills the gaps the observation network leaves.
That pairing matters during wildfire smoke events. The nearest monitoring station can be up to 50 miles away, far enough to miss a nearby smoke plume entirely. The cross-check endpoint returns the observation alongside a forecast comparison and flags a discrepancy when the model reads notably higher, it never overrides the observation, so you decide how to present the disagreement.
Observed AQI is preliminary, unvalidated data. See Data credits.
Typical uses
Outdoor workforce safety, school and athletics decisions, event go/no-go calls, and consumer health advisories during wildfire season.
API key access
Air quality is not a separate API key product. The smoke and AQI endpoints under
/forecast/ (/forecast/aqi/point/, /forecast/aqi/history/, /forecast/smoke/point/,
/forecast/smoke/map/) are included with FLASH Edge, and /observations/aqi/ is included
with Observations.
Operations
7-Day Historical AQI
GET /forecast/aqi/history/ — Daily AQI for the 7 days before today, for the nearest US air quality monitoring station within 50 miles.
Current AQI with Smoke Cross-Check
GET /forecast/aqi/point/ — Current AQI observation from the nearest US air quality monitoring station within 50 miles, plus an optional forecast cross-check for locations where the nearest station may be too far away to catch...
CONUS Smoke/AQI Map
GET /forecast/smoke/map/ — Link to a single image covering all of CONUS with the current hour's AQI, colored by EPA AQI category.
Hourly Smoke/AQI Forecast
GET /forecast/smoke/point/ — Hourly PM2.5 and AQI smoke forecast out to 120 hours, combined from three internal forecast tiers (primary, fallback and backstop) into one hourly series.
Air Quality Index - Current
GET /observations/aqi/ — Current AQI from the nearest US air quality monitoring station within 75 miles.