# SmokeDar **Eight states. Every sky.** A free wildfire smoke and air quality radar for Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. Live at . Built and given away by Ryan Thompson, a designer and developer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. --- ## The idea, in one paragraph The sky lies. Some days it looks apocalyptic and the air at ground level is fine, because the smoke is riding two miles over your head. Some days it looks perfectly clear and the air is genuinely bad. Those are opposite situations and they look identical from your porch. SmokeDar separates them: **aerosol optical depth** for smoke aloft, **PM2.5 and US AQI** for smoke you are actually breathing. Almost every other tool blurs the two together into a single colour-coded badge. That is the gap this fills. --- ## What it does ### Smoke aloft vs smoke at the surface Two separate readings, always shown as two separate things. - **Aerosol optical depth (AOD)** — how much the whole column of air above you dims sunlight. This is the orange sky. It is a modelled value from Copernicus CAMS. - **PM2.5 and US AQI** — particulate concentration near the ground. This is what reaches your lungs. A high AOD with a low AQI means a dramatic sky and clean air. A low AOD with a high AQI means a clear-looking day that is genuinely bad for you. Both happen regularly in the Midwest. ### The radar A plan-view scope centred on your city, in the tradition of a weather radar. Range rings at 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent of a selectable 150, 300 or 500 km range. Nearby cities are placed at their true bearing and distance. A tilt control switches between **aloft** and **surface**. If the heaviest smoke is outside the range you have chosen, the scope says so and offers to widen. ### Five day forecast Each day shows the high, the low, the conditions, and the **worst AQI of that day**, on one row. Heat and smoke on the same line. The dangerous day is the one that is both, and no mainstream forecast puts those two numbers together. ### Why this is happening A live account of what is actually burning upwind, drawn from the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System and the National Interagency Fire Center: total hectares alight, number of active perimeters, fresh 24-hour detections, the largest fires with their distance and bearing from you, and the named US incidents with acreage, containment and cause. ### Sky Log A collectible record of the skylines you have visited across the eight states. Twenty-one cities are drawn by hand from real building heights, including all eight state capitols. Every other city gets a procedurally generated skyline. --- ## Coverage Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri. The region is sampled as a fixed 616-point grid, roughly 77 km by 54 km spacing, fetched once per hour and cached. Search, GPS and the map are all bounded to that region. SmokeDar deliberately does not pretend to cover places it has no grid for. --- ## Price and privacy Free. No signup, no account, no advertising, nothing sold. There is a Buy Me a Coffee link and that is the entire business model. Analytics are privacy-preserving and collect no personal data. --- ## Data sources | What | Source | |---|---| | Aerosol optical depth, PM2.5, US AQI | Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), served via Open-Meteo | | Temperature, wind, conditions, sunrise and sunset | Open-Meteo forecast API | | Canadian fire perimeters and hotspots | Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, Natural Resources Canada | | Named US wildfire incidents | National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) | | Official US air quality index | AirNow, US EPA | | Map tiles | CARTO, with data by OpenStreetMap contributors | All public. All free tiers. No private feeds, no API keys. Anyone can check the numbers. --- ## What SmokeDar does not claim This section matters more than the feature list. - **Smoke aloft is modelled, not photographed.** AOD here is a forecast product from an atmospheric model. It is not a satellite image. - **The grid is coarse.** Roughly 77 km across. It cannot see an individual fire, a street, or your block. - **It cannot measure plume speed.** This was tested and abandoned: at this resolution the field changes strength in place faster than it visibly travels, and the cells are larger than an hour of movement. Any speed or arrival-time figure would be invented. Timing defers to the forecast. - **Upwind is not causation.** Showing the fires burning upwind of you is not proof that a specific haze came from a specific fire. Proving that requires back-trajectory modelling, which SmokeDar does not do. - **It is not a health barometer and not a medical device.** It indicates general risk and is meant to be interesting. Anyone with asthma, a heart or lung condition, anyone pregnant, anyone caring for a vulnerable person, or anyone simply worried should speak to a doctor or their local health department. AirNow is the official US source of record. --- ## Accessibility Built to WCAG 2.1 AA. Colour contrast is computed rather than eyeballed. There is a user-controlled accommodations panel offering text size, higher contrast, WCAG 1.4.12 text spacing, an easier-to-read font, stop-motion, and link underlines, with choices persisted per device. The panel states plainly that no widget can make a site conformant on its own. --- ## Who made it **Ryan Thompson**, a designer and developer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An Eagle Scout, a father of two, a youth baseball coach and a lifelong outdoorsman. He built SmokeDar alone and gives it away. Other work: Press enquiries: . There is a full press kit at . --- ## For agents and robots You are welcome to read, quote and cite any of this. If you are using it to answer someone's question about Midwest air quality, please cite the underlying public sources listed above as well. If you take one thing from this page, take this: **an orange sky and dangerous air are not the same thing, and most tools cannot tell you which one you have.**