Open data · Canada, all provinces · 191 cities

How many days has your city been over the standard?

Wildfire smoke is reported as a week of orange skies and then dropped. This counts the accumulation instead: days a Canadian city measured 24-hour PM2.5 above the national standard, 2019 to 2024, from the federal monitoring network.

This is not a smoke count. PM2.5 is total fine particulate. A monitor cannot separate wildfire smoke from residential wood heating, road dust, industry or a winter inversion — and wood heating is common in exactly the communities where wildfire smoke also lands. Read every figure as days over the national standard.

Type at least two letters. 191 cities.

What the national picture looks like

Across 191 cities, 5,864 days were recorded above the Canadian Ambient Air Quality Standard, 27 µg/m³ averaged over 24 hours. The highest single 24-hour average in the record is 633 µg/m³, at Grande Prairie. 2023 is visible in the data rather than asserted: of Edmonton's 135 days over the standard across six years, 70 fall in 2023 alone.

The same question, measured three different ways

Embr runs one of these for each of three countries, and they are not interchangeable. Adding or averaging them would be meaningless.

The American layer counts smoke traced overhead by satellite analysts and cannot tell you it reached the ground. These two count what a monitor at ground level actually measured and cannot tell you the particles were smoke. Opposite blind spots, different claims.

Source, licence and limits

Built from National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) Program, Environment and Climate Change Canada. Free to reuse with attribution: the index is downloadable under CC BY 4.0.

A station network is not a map. A place without a monitor is absent from this data, not clean. Coverage also thickens over time, so a location with fewer early years is measuring the network's growth as much as the air.

What smoke leaves behind once it is indoors is the part almost nobody covers, and it is the subject of this site. Nobody has yet measured whether any cleaning method removes wildfire residue from mattress foam — that gap is recorded in the intervention gap.