The air at the house is clean right now and the wind is coming off the ocean, not off the fires. The monitor 9 miles away at Multorpor is reading 13, solidly in the Good range, and all 52 ensemble forecasts for today show zero east wind — the one pattern that would pull Mt Hood's big east-side smoke over to your side of the crest.
The two uncontained fires that are actually on your side of the mountain sit 14 and 18 miles south, so a hazy afternoon or a smoky-smelling foggy morning is possible, but nothing in the data points to a smoky finish.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 7 in 1074% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Morning valley fog burning off to a clear view of Hood, blue sky, maybe a faint milky band low to the south late in the day. Nobody comments on the air. | nothing |
| 2 in 1021% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Flat white sky by mid-afternoon, the ridgelines toward Government Camp going soft, a campfire smell that lingers into the evening instead of clearing. Kids and hikers are fine; one person with asthma notices. | The Austin fire (18 mi S, 10,700 ac, uncontained) or The Narrows (14 mi SSW, uncontained) puts up a bigger afternoon column and tonight's forecast southwest breeze walks the plume up the Sandy/Zigzag valley, where the overnight inversion holds it. |
| 0 in 104% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Visibility under a couple of miles, an orange cast to the light, ash on car hoods, everyone moves indoors and shuts the windows. | A genuine run on one of the two west-side fires today — hundreds to thousands of acres in an afternoon — with the plume aimed straight up the valley and trapped by fog and calm overnight. |
| 0 in 102% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ You can't see across the meadow, headlights on at midday, indoor air stings without a filter running. | Requires either a new ignition within a few miles of Welches today, or an abrupt offshore/east-wind reversal that zero of 52 ensemble member-days currently show. |
Fires near the house, drawn at their real shape from the federal perimeter data, over USGS terrain. Dashed rings are distance from the house; the shaded wedge is the only direction an east wind could carry smoke here from. Point at a fire for its details.
Solid dots are fires too small to draw at this scale but whose size is known. A dashed circle would mean a fire that has been located but has no published perimeter - size unknown, not small.
Beyond this frame, and too far to threaten the house but close enough to add regional haze: Bench (67,071 acres, 45.5 mi SSE), Ten Mile (4,834 acres, 56.7 mi SE), High Lava (2,894 acres, 37.0 mi N), Beachcomb (2,346 acres, 49.5 mi SSE).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Outlines flown — Grasshopper Aug 29 · Austin Aug 29 · The Narrows Aug 29. The oldest is Grasshopper, 0 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 30, 4:54 AM, so a fire may already be larger than the shape drawn for it.
Terrain: USGS 3DEP (public domain). Roads and water: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Fire perimeters: NIFC.
Want to check it yourself, or see the rest of the state? The Oregonian's wildfire tracker is live and updates every 15 minutes.
The long-range ensembles show less east-wind risk than a normal year — weak evidence, but pointing the right way.
Caveat: this counts days whose dominant wind is easterly, which at a valley site also picks up ordinary overnight down-valley drainage, not only the Gorge-outflow events that actually carry smoke. Forecast and base rate are measured the same way, so the gap is the meaningful part; the absolute percentages are not a chance-of-smoke.
It is not one cut-off. Five sources arrive on five different dates, and the darker the strip, the more of them cover your weekend. Hover any day for the count.
▼ Since 2026-08-10 the forecast has moved better (-13 on the likely worst day) across 21 daily updates. Shading above shows source coverage, not this movement - hover a past day to see what we said that morning.
| now | Fire size & containment how big the fires are and whether they are being held |
| now | Long-range ensembles (GEFS 0.5 + GEM) wind direction, 52 members · reaches 32 days out |
| now | ECMWF ensemble (51 members) wind direction, the sharpest ensemble · reaches 13 days out |
| now | Deterministic weather (16-day) day-by-day wind and temperature · reaches 15 days out |
| now | Air-quality / smoke model (CAMS) actual AQI at the house · reaches 6 days out |
The dominant smoke source near this house is the 93,953-acre Grasshopper fire 17 miles east, and it is 83% contained and on the far side of an 11,250-foot ridge — it can only reach Welches on offshore easterly flow, and the ensembles put that at 0% of 52 member-days today against a 31% climatological rate, a 31-point negative departure that is real evidence against the bad case rather than a restatement of my prior. The fires that terrain does NOT shield are The Narrows (13.9 mi SSW at 45.14N/-122.09W) and Austin (18.5 mi S) — both sit west of the crest in the Clackamas drainage, both are 0% contained, and Austin at 10,708 acres is large enough to matter; tonight's forecast southwest breeze is the one wind direction that points their plumes at the house, which is why I hold a 26% chance of a merely hazy day rather than calling it clean. But 2 mph transport over 14-18 miles dilutes enormously, and a 24-hour average is hard to push past 100 on a day that started at 13 with only 20 hours left in it. The season is genuinely anomalous — 2.34 million Oregon acres, PL 5 since July 18, snowpack the lowest on record — but the 2.0 season-anomaly ratio is already measured in local AQI at this address and prices that in, so I apply it once and add only a worst-of-three-days uplift. The new-ignition risk that the acreage statistics really speak to has almost no lead time left to operate in: a fire starting today would need hours, not the usual days, to load this valley.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 13 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 17 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 12.
We are forecasting a worst day of 29, 16 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 296 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,953 acres · 83% contained |
| 18.5 mi | Austin S | 10,708 acres · 0% contained |
| 24.3 mi | Highland WSW | size not yet reported |
| 36.4 mi | Warehouse NW | 2 acres |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,894 acres · 30% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (Highland) have no size reported yet. Whether those are 300-acre creepers or 20,000-acre runners is most of the answer.
If the weekend is clean you carried masks for nothing. If it is not, this is the difference between a bad weekend and a ruined one.
| Sandy | 14.6 mi |
| Brightwood | 15.5 mi |
| Welches | 14.8 mi |
Distance from each point on the drive in to the nearest fire. TripCheck is the authority on closures.
Ranked by how bad these dates have historically been at each place. The coast is not just cleaner today — it sits upwind of everything burning, so it only smokes during an east-wind reversal, which is the same event that would smoke out the house.
| Place | Bad day / typical | Now | Official forecast | Next 5 days | Nearest fire |
| Newport coast | 20 / 16 | 17 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · Austin |
| Cannon Beach coast | 23 / 20 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 23 / 21 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 23 / 21 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 25 / 18 | 9 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 28 / 18 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Astoria coast | 29 / 26 | 16 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 30 / 26 | 16 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 42 / 31 | 19 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 27 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 48 / 34 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 90 / 53 | 79 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/30/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/30/26 by Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality | Next published outlook for that reporting area — a human forecaster's call Oregon DEQ via AirNow |
| Next 5 days | today's model run, covering 2026-09-03 | Direction only. Copernicus CAMS global air-quality model open-meteo.com |
| Bad day / typical | Aug 26 – Sep 1 in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 (28 days each) | CAMS reanalysis for those exact dates, then converted to the monitor scale open-meteo.com |
| Scale conversion | median of 14 daily model-vs-monitor pairs, 2026-08-16 to 2026-08-29 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.362 on the coast to 0.799 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 30 5:01 AM | Perimeter polygons of fires over 100 acres, distance to the burned edge NIFC WFIGS |
Every AQI figure above is on the ground-monitor scale — the same thing your phone shows. n/a means the model and the monitors disagree so sharply at that spot that we cannot honestly place it on that scale (steep terrain inside a coarse model grid cell — the Gorge is the usual culprit); those rows are sorted by today’s reading instead.
Fire perimeters from NIFC, evacuation zones from Oregon OEM, weather and alerts from NWS, air quality from AirNow (Multorpor, 8.7 mi away). The forecast is judged by Claude Opus 5 on the live data above, sampled 5 times and pooled conservatively.
It is a judgement, never scored against an outcome. Nobody forecasts smoke this far out: NOAA's smoke model runs 48 hours and the EPA's air-quality forecast is for tomorrow. Two-to-six weeks ahead is what meteorologists call the predictability desert. Anyone giving you a number for the trip right now - us included - is giving you a base rate with a story attached.
How thin the history is. The air-quality record for this spot begins in 2022, so "normal" here is built from just 4 years (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025). In those 28 sampled days the worst single day was AQI 24, and none reached 100.
That record has never seen a bad Oregon smoke year — not 2020, when Portland sat above AQI 500 for days, nor 2017, 2018 or 2021. So the base rate below is drawn entirely from calm years, and the upper end of our range is an estimate rather than something history has shown us. It is the main reason not to read the good news too confidently.
Are these forecasts any good? Across 75 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 1 of 5 lead times. Where it does not, this page should not be trusted to out-guess them either.
AQI here means the highest 24-hour PM2.5 value touching a day, at the house, on the local monitor scale - the same thing your phone shows. The model's own restatement of the target: “I am forecasting the highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 that touches each calendar day at the house in Mt Hood Village/Welches (45.320N, -121.956W), reported on the local monitor scale — the number a phone weather or AirNow app would show — with the model-to-monitor bias correction already applied in the evidence and no further correction of my own. My headline number is the worst single one of those three daily values across Aug 28, 29, and 30, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.