North Dakota Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map

Fire season and landscape

Grass fire windows open in spring before green-up, roughly March through May, and again in fall after the prairie cures, driven by wind and humidity rather than heat. In severe drought years the two windows can merge into a season that runs most of the year.

The Little Missouri National Grassland, the largest in the country, wraps around Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the western Badlands, with the Sheyenne National Grassland in the southeast. The hazard profile is almost entirely fine-fuel grass fire, plus spring flood risk on the Red and Souris Rivers that regularly outweighs fire as the state's active hazard.

• The smoke and air quality forecast layers matter here even in quiet fire years, because Canadian wildfire smoke regularly drives the state's worst air days.
• Spring and fall red flag warnings mark North Dakota's real fire windows better than the calendar does.
• The river gauge layer carries the Red River at Fargo and the Souris at Minot, both with long flood histories worth watching each spring.