Omaha, NE Air Quality Index (AQI) Today

Omaha is not flat, though the map suggests it. The Missouri has cut a trench into a loess-mantled plain, and city elevations run from roughly 900 feet on the bottoms to about 1,300 on the uplands, with bluffs on both banks; across the river the Iowa Loess Hills stand a couple hundred feet above the floodplain. That is not mountain relief, but it is enough for cold air to settle in the river bottom on a calm winter night, and the trench runs broadly north to south, which gives arriving air a channel to follow.

Local sources divide between fixed and moving. OPPD’s North Omaha Station is still burning coal: the utility set 2023 for the end of it, then 2026, and in December 2025 its board voted six to two to defer the conversion to gas until at least 2028. Union Pacific is headquartered downtown and its main line crosses the Missouri here, as does I-80 just south of the center, so diesel exhaust runs in lines across the metro rather than standing at one point.

The sharpest recent particulate events began outside Nebraska altogether. State agencies issued smoke advisories covering eastern Nebraska, Omaha included, during the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, the largest on record in Canada, and again in 2025. Sight lines here run for tens of miles over open ground, which is why that smoke registers first as a whitened horizon and only later as a number.