Air quality in the greater Milwaukee area has been getting worse in recent years, according to the American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report.
In fact, air quality was poor in much of the state due to wildfires burning in Canada.
Close to summer’s end, Wisconsin had nine days in a row of poor air quality advisories.
Craig Czarnecki says we’d never had an advisory that long before. Czarnecki is the outreach coordinator for the DNR’s Air Management program.
In a recent conversation, I asked him to zero in on Milwaukee’s air quality during wildfires in Canada.
“This year to date so far, Milwaukee has had 15 days with a PM 2.5 or fine particulate matter advisory, and those 15 days are all a result of Canadian wildfire smoke impacts,” Czarnecki says. There were no such days in 2024. But …
“Then 2023 was another year with a lot of wildfire smoke impacts; that year we had 17 days in Milwaukee. So, yeah, 2025 and 2023 were both very significant years as far as wildfire activity in Canada,” he adds.
Those numbers correspond with the magnitude of the fires in Canada. The country had a record high number of fires and acres burned in 2023. This year was the second highest.
I asked Czarnecki what it means for human health when there’s a fine particulate matter advisory.
“They are very, very tiny particles — tinier than the diameter of a human hair. These particles are inhalable. They can get into your lungs and bloodstream and that’s where they can cause a number of health issues.”
Anyone can be impacted, but it’s a special concern for those in sensitive groups. Those tiny particles can cause a variety of symptoms.
“That would be anyone with pre-existing heart or lung ailments, people with asthma, children, the elderly. So all these people are going to be more sensitive to these elevated levels of pollution, especially on advisory days,” Czarnecki says. “Eye and respiratory tract irritation, coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing. If you’re feeling any of those kinds of symptoms on those air quality advisory days, it’d be recommended to take a break, you know, listen to your body, pay attention to the symptoms, take a break and move indoors if at all possible.”
I asked Czarnecki about the relationship between climate change and poor air quality here.
“Wildfire conditions in Canada have been changing recently; they’ve had shorter winters; they’ve had less precipitation in winter. The spring is starting sooner, things are more dry, it’s windier, you know, it’s getting hotter sooner. Bundle up all those ingredients and you get, you know, these massive fires, which you’ve seen two of the last three years.”
Yet Czarnecki says you can’t predict long-term air quality trends based on just a couple of years. “We’ve had these two kinds of spike years, so it’ll be interesting to kind of see if that trend continues or if we’re going to kind of go back to normal again.”
Czarnecki adds that since the early ’90s, Wisconsin actually has had a steady decline in pollutants like ozone and fine particulate matter.
But he says recently that decline has begun to level off.
This year’s “State of the Air” report from the American Lung Association graded exposure to unhealthy levels of ozone air pollution and particle pollution from 2021 through 2023.
It says air quality in the Milwaukee metro area ranked 26th worst in the nation for ozone pollution, with 9.5 unhealthy days per year.
The metro area ranked the 50th worst in the nation for particle pollution, with 3.8 unhealthy days per year.
The report says nearly half of the U.S. population lives in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution, with extreme heat and wildfires contributing to worsening air quality.
To keep people informed of air quality in Wisconsin communities, the DNR recently updated its air quality data map, making it more intuitive and user-friendly.
