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Low Wildfire Smoke Risk

Lower NOAA HMS smoke-plume exposure and EPA PM2.5/AQI event burden scores higher.

Scale0-100

Higher values rank better for this score.

How It's Calculated

The latest published score is normalized to a 0-100 scale. The method below explains what the score rewards, with technical source metadata available for audit.

Scoring Method

How the ranking is built

Low Wildfire Smoke Risk rewards places with lower recent NOAA HMS smoke-plume exposure, with EPA PM2.5/AQI event signals as supporting evidence.

  1. 1

    The smoke score is 45% low density-weighted HMS smoke days, 25% low medium/heavy HMS smoke days, 15% low heavy HMS smoke days, 10% low PM2.5 event day share, and 5% low maximum AQI.

  2. 2

    HMS components use recent multi-year point-in-polygon exposure

  3. 3

    EPA components are inverse percentile-rank normalized over all scored places.

Technical details
Score TypeMaster Score

Read from the current master score table for this criterion.

Ranking BasisSingle Score

The top 10 below ignore your blended relocation weights and sort only by Low Wildfire Smoke Risk.

No source details available for this score.

What This Score Means

Low Wildfire Smoke Risk rewards places with lower recent NOAA HMS smoke-plume exposure, with EPA PM2.5/AQI event signals as supporting evidence.

Statistics Feeding This Score

  • HMS smoke days

    Average annual days where the place point fell inside a NOAA HMS smoke plume from the recent multi-year bundle.

    Source: EPA AirData
  • Medium/heavy HMS smoke days

    Average annual days where the place point fell inside a medium or heavy NOAA HMS smoke-density plume.

    Source: EPA AirData
  • Density-weighted HMS smoke days

    Average annual plume exposure with light=1, medium=2, and heavy=3.

    Source: EPA AirData
  • PM2.5 event day share

    PM2.5 primary-pollutant day share multiplied by the share of non-good AQI days.

    Source: EPA AirData
  • Maximum AQI

    Highest county AQI day in the annual EPA summary, used as a supporting event-tail signal.

    Source: EPA AirData

Source Data

Source: NOAA HMS Smoke PolygonsDaily NOAA/NESDIS Hazard Mapping System smoke plume polygons with light, medium, and heavy density classes.Source: EPA AirDataEPA annual AQI by county and annual concentration by monitor files for PM2.5 and ozone.

Known Limits

  • HMS smoke plumes are analyst-drawn satellite/observational polygons, not ground-level PM2.5 concentration measurements.
  • The score can miss smoke under clouds, near-surface concentration, plume height, wind-driven vertical mixing, indoor filtration, and neighborhood-scale terrain effects.
  • Future versions can add daily PM2.5 station/event attribution or gridded smoke concentration models.

Top 10 Locations

Ranked by Low Wildfire Smoke Risk.

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