The big fire east of Mt Hood needs an east wind to push smoke over the crest to you, and not one of the 156 ensemble forecasts for this weekend produces that wind — instead the flow is onshore, with fog and a shower band Saturday. The monitor eight miles from the house is reading 11 out of 500 this morning, which is as clean as this valley gets.
The realistic risk is not the famous fire to the east but the two small uncontained fires 14 and 19 miles to the south on your side of the mountains, which could put a haze in the valley on Sunday if the front fizzles and cold air pools overnight.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 8 in 1075% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Morning fog burning off to blue sky, Mt Hood visible from the highway, maybe a faint milkiness on the southern horizon; nobody smells smoke. | nothing |
| 2 in 1018% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Flat white sky, the ridgelines to the south go soft, a campfire smell in the early morning that lifts by noon; the phone app says Moderate. | Kids and anyone with asthma take it easy on the long hike; do the river instead of the ridge, and close windows overnight. |
| 0 in 104% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange-ish light, the far side of the valley is a gray wall, eyes sting outdoors after 20 minutes, smoke smell indoors. | One day moved inside — cards, cooking, a movie. Run a HEPA box fan in the sleeping rooms and drive with the AC on recirculate. |
| 0 in 102% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ You cannot see the far ridge at all, streetlights on midday, headache after an hour outside; local news is covering it. | Anyone with asthma, a heart condition, a pregnancy, or a small kid should leave for Portland or the coast; the rest of the group stays indoors with the purifier running. |
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 (2,776 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 26 · Austin Aug 26 · The Narrows Aug 26. The oldest is Grasshopper, 2 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 28, 4:35 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 (-16 on the likely worst day) across 19 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 |
For smoke to reach this house from the 93,839-acre Grasshopper fire, air has to move east-to-west over an 11,250-foot mountain, and 156 out of 156 ensemble member-days across two model systems show no easterly flow on the trip dates against a 31% climatological rate — a 31-point negative departure that removes the mechanism the bad case depends on, and Grasshopper is 76% contained on top of that. What terrain does not solve is the southern fires: The Narrows at bearing 208 sits near 45.14N/-122.09W and Austin lies 19 miles south, both west of the crest, both at 0% containment, so no mountain stands between them and the house — they need only a south or southwest wind, and the forecast gives NNW then WNW then W instead. Saturday's shower band and westerly onshore flow are the ventilating, fuel-wetting outcome, and the monitor 8.7 miles away is reading 11 right now, so the trip starts clean. Against that, the light-and-variable winds with fog are exactly the setup that pools whatever smoke does get produced into the Sandy/Zigzag valley overnight, which is why I keep a real p90 near 70 rather than collapsing to the 22 the four-year archive shows as its worst day in this window. That archive starts in 2022 and has never seen a 2020-class year, so I treat its zero-percent-over-100 as under-sampled rather than measured, and the record 2.34-million-acre season with PL 5 nationally keeps a small new-ignition tail alive over a three-day window.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 12 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 16 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 11.
We are forecasting a worst day of 26, 14 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 288 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,839 acres · 76% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 9,824 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 | 2,776 acres · 25% 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 | 18 / 15 | 9 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · Austin |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 18 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 12 Clear | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 17 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 28 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 89 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/28/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/28/26 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 2026-09-01 | 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, 2026-08-08 to 2026-08-21 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.342 on the coast to 1.091 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 28 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 22, 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 65 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 4 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 any of August 28, 29, or 30, 2026, at the house in Welches — the number a phone air-quality app would show at that address, on the local monitor scale as already calibrated in the evidence pack, with no further bias correction from me — and I am reporting the worst single one of those three days, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.