Minnesota Had Some of the Worst Air Quality in the World Last Weekend

The air quality this past weekend was ROUGH all across Minnesota. It was especially bad in the northeast portion of the state, but it wasn't great anywhere because of the wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada.

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Poor Air Quality in Minnesota this Past Weekend

A friend of mine who lives in the northeast part of Minnesota was sending me pictures this weekend. Even though it was sunny, it was gray and hazy and looked like smoke from a giant bonfire.

The Twin Cities wasn't great either. I was there over the weekend and spent a few hours outside, and I definitely could feel it in my throat after! Rochester was a bit hazy and had poor air quality, too.

I think the only part of the state that was spared was the southwest portion, where it looked like, based on the air quality maps I looked at this weekend, the air quality wasn't affected by the wildfire smoke.

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Air Quality Index

There are a few different places where you can see the air quality index (AQI), which basically will tell you how clean the air is outside.

IQAir, one of the sites I was looking at this past weekend, lays out their AQI scoring like this:

They rank major cities around the world daily based on the air quality index, and Minnesota was ranking REALLY high over the weekend.

Minnesota Had Some of the Worst Air Quality in the World

I only grabbed a screenshot of the ranking from Saturday, July 12th, but Minneapolis, which didn't get hit with the worst smoke, came in as having the 8th worst air quality in the entire world.

And Minneapolis didn't even have the worst of it in the state.

When I was looking at a map, I remember seeing the northeast part of the state either in the red/unhealthy ranking or the purple/very unhealthy ranking. That would have caused Minnesota as a whole to rank even higher on that list.

I didn't check Sunday's rankings, but today, Monday, July 14th, we're still up there at number 14, but a lot better.

You can see that the wind is blowing that wildfire smoke into Chicago now, and they're dealing with it today, coming in as the 8th worst air quality in the world.

Thankfully, for most, if not all of Minnesota, we're in the clear and our air quality is getting better.