North Dakota air quality today
Across the 2 North Dakota metros BreatheCheck measures, air is worst right now in Bismarck at AQI 26 (Good) and cleanest in Fargo at AQI 19.
Which North Dakota city has the worst air quality right now?
| # | Metro | AQI | UV now | Dominant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bismarckno page yet | 26Good | 1.7 | O3 | |
| 2 | Fargono page yet | 19Good | 0.5 | O3 |
What is the UV index in North Dakota today?
The strongest UV in North Dakota today is 5.2 (Moderate) in Bismarck, arriving around 2pm local time. The mildest of the 2 metros we model here peaks at 1.3 in Fargo.
Eight monitors, no state smoke forecast
North Dakota does not forecast its own air. The Division of Air Quality inside the state Department of Environmental Quality runs eight ambient monitoring sites for the whole state and reports them hourly to AirNow, and during the 2026 smoke season the division said plainly that it puts out no smoke alerts or forecasts, because the team is too small to produce them, and pointed residents to local media and the AirNow app instead. That changes what the numbers on this page are: measurements on a federal feed, with no state interpretation layered on top.
What those eight monitors mostly catch in summer comes from Canada. The prairie has no ridge to hold smoke and no coast to recirculate it, so boreal plumes arrive on the wind and leave the same way. Some of it stays aloft and never reaches an instrument; some mixes down, and the surface reading can differ by hundreds of miles across the state on the same afternoon.
The sources the state does regulate are wellheads. DEQ requires at minimum a pit flare achieving 90 percent destruction and removal efficiency for wellhead and tank emissions on every new well from its first day of production, and runs a voluntary High Efficiency Program for operators seeking approval to use equipment rated above that floor. That guidance was written for the Bakken, Three Forks and Sanish formations specifically. No city in North Dakota has a page here yet.
Where do these North Dakota readings come from?
2 of the 2 metros here report from a named regulatory monitor — Fargo, Bismarck. The dominant pollutant across North Dakota today is O3.
We track 2 metropolitan areas in North Dakota, not the whole state, and none of them has its own page yet — we publish a metro page where searches for it clear a floor, and none here does, though every one is measured hourly. There is no state-wide average here on purpose: averaging 2 metros into one figure would invent a value for all the ground between them. How we measure, and what we refuse to estimate →
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