Data, maps and charts from NYC’s air quality crisis: June 2023

New York City and its surrounding areas are finally breathing easy. As of June 13, air quality was good across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The area started the first two weeks of June draped with dangerous smoke plumes from wildfires in Ontario and Quebec. That was due to a stalled, swirling cyclone of air near Maine that was blocking the typically eastward airflow and forcing the smoke south. Several blazes also sparked in New Jersey during this period.

Officials in New York and New Jersey issued air quality warnings and asked residents to refrain from unnecessary outdoor activities. But as the air mass shifted west, the smoke lifted, allowing many events to go ahead as scheduled the weekend of June 10.

“For this time of year, we're normally between zero and 50 (AQI), which would be in the green or healthy levels,” said NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan during the crisis. “It's not uncommon when you have a period of high temperature, not too many storms, high heat to have a day where the AQI is above 100 for a day. But typically, it doesn't last longer than that.”

Now that air quality has improved, Gothamist will pause updates to this page — but we’ll refresh if air pollution spikes again. In the meantime, the air quality map and chart will auto-update.

Masks and air purifiers can help protect people from some of the pollution’s health effects. If you're using an air conditioner, be sure to close the fresh air intake to prevent outdoor air from entering your home, New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Zachary Iscol recommended during the crisis. And people with conditions like asthma should be extra careful about their exposure.

Asthma-related visits spiked along with pollutant concentrations, according to city-run public health tracking. The number of daily emergency room visits for asthma hadn’t been that high since April, when tree pollen levels were at their highest.

City-run air monitors scattered around Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx show that air pollution spiked on Tuesday evening, then cooled off again before skyrocketing to new heights Wednesday afternoon. The readings dwarfed air pollution figures from last week, when fires in Nova Scotia also affected local air quality. Róisín Commane, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, cautioned that the monitor readings can be unreliable at very high pollutant concentrations.

“I'm not sure there's many things that can measure well when the numbers are this high,” she said. “But once it's above a certain amount, it's toxic to people. So whether it's 350 or 355 doesn't really matter if you have to breathe it.”

Concentrations of PM2.5 have declined precipitously since then, according to the monitor data.

The Canadian smoke may not be typical, but we’re also at risk of local fires this summer, Commane added.

“We had so little moisture in the springtime that our soils are exceedingly dry right now,” she said. “Fires could break out closer to home.”