Rhode Island Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map

Fire season and landscape

The fire window runs from late March through May, when last year's oak leaves and pine litter cure between snowmelt and green-up; occasional multi-hundred-acre fires have burned in the Arcadia and Big River country. In most recent summers, unhealthy air quality days have come from Canadian wildfire smoke rather than local fires.

The Arcadia Management Area and the surrounding state lands in Exeter and West Greenwich hold most of Rhode Island's contiguous forest, sandy-soiled and fire-adapted. East of that the state is mostly coastline and city, where the operative hazards are coastal flooding on Narragansett Bay and a storm surge history that runs back through the 1938 hurricane.

• Fires in the Arcadia country are small on a national scale but significant for the state, and the 24-hour hotspot layer is usually the first public signal.
• Rhode Island's unhealthy AQI days in recent years trace almost entirely to transported smoke, which the smoke and air quality layers show arriving from the north and west.
• The Pawtuxet and Wood rivers respond quickly to heavy rain, and the river gauge layer covers those rises across the state's small basins.