Iowa Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map

Fire season and landscape

Local fire activity clusters in early spring, roughly March and April, when last year's grass is fully cured and fields are bare, with a shorter window after fall harvest. The recurring summer hazard is not Iowa fire but smoke transported from Canadian and western fires, which can degrade air quality statewide for days. Flooding on the Missouri, Mississippi, Cedar, and Des Moines rivers is the state's other standing concern.

Iowa has no national forest; its public land runs to state forests like Stephens and Shimek in the south and the steep prairie ridges of the Loess Hills along the Missouri River. Between the two big border rivers the state is dominated by row crops, so fire means grass, ditch, and field fires rather than timber. The Driftless corner in the northeast adds bluff country above the Mississippi.

• A red flag warning in Iowa typically means strong wind over cured grass, conditions that can carry a ditch fire across open country in an afternoon.
• Smoke over Iowa is almost always imported, so comparing the smoke layer against the wildfire layer usually shows the source burning hundreds of miles upwind.
• The Cedar, Des Moines, and Raccoon rivers all have long flood histories; the river gauge layer shows stage against flood thresholds at each station.