REGIONAL— Smoky air may be the new reality in a Minnesota summer, but meteorologists with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency think the state will avoid the kind of conditions experienced last summer. That’s when the state, particularly northern Minnesota, experienced air quality alerts on nearly a third of the days last summer, including some days rated as hazardous for the first time.
This year, forecasters expect they’ll need to issue air quality alerts in northern Minnesota between 12 and 16 days this summer. That’s about on par with 2024, when the state saw 14 days with bad air quality due to wildfire smoke.
MPCA data shows that dense smoke from wildfires has become a major air quality issue over the past several years, a condition that is fueled by climate change. As recently as ten years ago, wildfire smoke rarely impacted air quality in the state, but that began to change beginning around 2018, when the state experienced eight air quality alerts due to wildfire smoke. That jumped to 37 days by 2021, 41 days in 2023, and 40 days last year. St. Louis County saw the highest number of bad air days due to wildfire smoke, due to a combination of smoke from the Brimson Complex fires in May combined with summer-long incursions of smoke from enormous fires in Canada.
This summer, smoke from anticipated fires in the western U.S. are expected to factor into air quality concerns in Minnesota, according to Matt Taraldsen, a forecaster with the MPCA. “The western U.S. has been exceedingly dry,” Taraldsen noted, and he expects that trend to continue both in the West as well as here in Minnesota, due to the expected development of a record-setting el Niño pattern in the Pacific, which typically brings warmer and drier conditions to much of the U.S., including Minnesota.
While Canada has, so far, avoided the extreme early heat experienced in 2023 and 2025, Taraldsen still expects to see wildfire activity build in Canada over the summer. He noted that some of the major fires north of the border last year continued to burn underground over the winter and that those fires will eventually pop up as conditions dry over the summer. Some of the smoke from those fires will likely make its way to Minnesota, depending on wind patterns.
Health concerns
While all types of air pollution come with health effects, state health officials note that wildfire smoke, which tends to include large amounts of very tiny particulates, can be some of the most dangerous. The tiny particles, typically under 2.5 microns in diameter, are able to pass through the lungs into the bloodstream, where they can carry toxins, like lead and cadmium, to all parts of the body.
The threat from wildfire smoke is a relatively recent phenomenon in the state. Prior to 2015, outbreaks of wildfire smoke were rare, with no more than a handful per decade (see graphic at right). At the same time, reductions in air emissions from most sources had substantially improved air quality in the state.
Since 2015, however, wildfire smoke has prompted an enormous increase in the number of alerts for unhealthy air and now contribute to more than 80 percent of air quality alerts in the state. The incidence of wildfire smoke has reversed all the air quality gains of the past several decades, and have greatly worsened conditions in northern Minnesota, where air quality alerts were previously virtually unknown.
State officials are working to be sure that Minnesotans are alerted when air quality risks arise and they point to smartphone apps like AirNow, which provides up-to-the-minute data on the current air quality as well five-day extended forecasts of anticipated air quality. The public can also sign up for alerts from the Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroFlash program, which will send instant notification of alerts to your email inbox. Go to https://www.enviroflash.info/signup.cfm to sign up.