Michigan Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map

Fire season and landscape

The prime window is April through June, after snowmelt and before full green-up, the same setup behind the 2012 Duck Lake Fire in the eastern UP. Drought summers can keep the pine country flammable into August. Most summers the statewide constant is Canadian smoke, which can sit over the Great Lakes region for days at a time in active years.

Three national forests anchor the public land: the Ottawa and Hiawatha in the Upper Peninsula and the Huron-Manistee across the northern Lower Peninsula, all mixed with extensive state forest. The fuels that matter are jack pine and red pine on deep sand, some of the most fire-prone ground east of the Mississippi. Great Lakes shoreline weather and spring river flooding fill out the hazard picture.

• Jack pine fires in the northern Lower and the UP can move fast enough that satellite hotspot detections lead the mapped perimeter by hours.
• Dry cold-front passages are the classic setup for Michigan's larger spring fires, and the red flag warning layer shows the affected counties as warnings are issued.
• Smoke crossing Lake Superior and Lake Michigan mixes down to the surface unevenly, so pairing the smoke layer with live AQI stations shows which cities are actually in it.