Maine Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map

Fire season and landscape

Spring remains the main fire window. The state's largest recorded fire event was October 1947, when drought-driven fires burned Bar Harbor and more than 200,000 acres statewide. Modern seasons are mostly quiet locally; the recurring factor is Canadian smoke crossing the border, which northern Maine often sees before anywhere else in the Northeast.

Acadia National Park anchors the coast, Baxter State Park holds Katahdin, and the North Maine Woods spreads across millions of acres of commercial forest with more logging roads than pavement. The hazard profile includes spring flooding on the Kennebec and Penobscot, coastal storms, and a long mud-season gap between snowmelt and green-up when fine fuels cure.

• Remote fires in the North Maine Woods can burn for hours before anyone reports them, and the satellite hotspot layers are often the first record that exists.
• Because Quebec's fire country sits directly upwind, the smoke layer frequently shows plumes over Maine before AQI changes register anywhere else in New England.
• Ice-out and snowmelt drive the Kennebec and Penobscot in April, and the river gauge and snowpack layers together frame that runoff season.