Tracking the seasonal fires and smog across north India and Pakistan
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Every winter, smoke from crop fires, dust and exhaust settles over the Indo-Gangetic plain. This page combines satellite fire detections, ground monitors and atmospheric models, and keeps every reading so this season can be compared with earlier ones.
Air quality right now
Hourly air quality for cities across the region, with the haze layer showing aerosol optical depth, a measure of how much smoke and dust is in the air. City values are modelled by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service; ground stations show measured readings.
City rankings
Cities ranked by their current air quality index. Cigarette equivalents follow Berkeley Earth's estimate that breathing 22 µg/m³ of PM2.5 for a day is roughly as harmful as smoking one cigarette.
Daily air quality bulletin
Cities in each AQI category
Ten most polluted cities
Delhi NCR
Most polluted city in each state
Cities meeting India's daily PM2.5 standard, by state
A closer look at one city
Every day of the year
Daily air quality on the CPCB scale from stored CAMS data.
This winter against earlier ones
Diwali
Can the smoke escape?
Mixing height (grey area) is how high pollution can spread upwards; wind speed (blue line) is how fast it is carried away. Their product, the ventilation index, below 6,000 m²/s (shaded) means pollution stays trapped. Seven days of history and three days of forecast.
India and Pakistan's fire season, by the numbers
Farmers across Punjab, Haryana and Pakistan's Punjab province burn crop residue twice a year: after the wheat harvest around April and May, and after the rice harvest in October and November.
Weekly measures of this year's fires
National totals for India and Pakistan compared with previous years.
Weekly thermal anomalies
Weekly area burnt
Weekly fire emissions
Fire danger
Each point covers seven days.
Stubble-burning tracker
Every fire detection in the region is stored, so the same stretch of the calendar can be compared across years for any state or district.
Districts with the most fires this season
Fire map
Active fire detections from NASA's VIIRS instrument. Pick a window, show individual hotspots or totals by district, and put it next to the same dates in an earlier year.
Seen from space
Daily satellite images from NASA. Drag the handle to compare two dates. Red squares mark fire detections stored for each day.
Each autumn, Delhi and the cities around it move through stages of a graded response plan as the air quality index climbs, restricting construction, diesel generators and older vehicles, and in severe episodes moving schools online. Lahore and other cities in Pakistan's Punjab take similar steps, including closures and limits on brick kilns.
Fire counts alone do not decide how bad the air gets. Wind direction, rain and the height of the mixing layer all change how much smoke reaches the cities, which is why the maps and charts on this page can tell different stories in the same week.
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Hotspots, or thermal anomalies, are detections of unusually hot pixels by satellite sensors. Most here are crop fires, but some come from industry or flares. Clouds and thick haze hide fires, so counts are a lower bound. Fire intensity is the summed fire radiative power of the detections, in gigawatts.
Every fire detection in the stored region is kept in a database with its district, state and country, so any period can be compared with any other. Districts and states follow the Government of India's depiction of the country's boundaries; detections in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, including areas administered by Pakistan and China, are counted under India. National charts for Pakistan use NASA's country totals.
City air quality is modelled by CAMS, so it can differ from ground monitors. The India AQI uses CPCB breakpoints on 24-hour average PM2.5 and PM10. Fire danger is the Canadian Fire Weather Index, computed from ERA5 reanalysis weather and averaged by week.
Sources
NASA FIRMS (VIIRS active fires); Copernicus GWIS (burnt area, CAMS GFAS fire emissions); Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service and ERA5 via Open-Meteo (air quality, aerosol optical depth, wind, mixing height); CPCB continuous monitors via data.gov.in; OpenAQ; NASA GIBS (satellite imagery); India boundaries © OpenStreetMap contributors (vardhan-maps, GoI depiction); Natural Earth.
Data feeds
The map of India is aligned with the Government of India's depiction but is not an official Survey of India map.