The air around Mt Hood right now is rated Good, and the weather for your three days is fog, light onshore breezes and no east wind at all — the pattern that normally pushes smoke over the mountains toward your house is completely absent from every forecast model. Expect the house to sit in the Moderate range, probably around 50-60, which looks like milky skies, an orange sunset and a faint campfire smell, and is fine for healthy people.
The real caveat is two uncontained fires 14 and 19 miles to the south of you, on your side of the mountains, so bring a plan for one bad morning rather than assuming the whole weekend is clean.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 3 in 1027% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Morning fog burns off to real blue sky, Mt Hood sharp against it all afternoon, no smell of smoke. | nothing |
| 5 in 1053% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 White-gray milkiness, the mountain looks flat and distant, deep orange sunsets, a faint campfire smell in the morning that clears by lunch. Everyone hikes; one or two people notice it. | Nothing about the trip. Kids and anyone with asthma take it easy in the early morning and do the hard hiking mid-afternoon when the valley has vented. |
| 1 in 1013% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You can taste it. Visibility down to a couple of miles, sun a dull disc, eyes and throat scratchy, and it does not clear at midday. | Swap the summit hike for a river day or a drive west toward Sandy/Portland, run a box fan with a furnace filter indoors, close the windows overnight. |
| 1 in 107% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown air, headlights on at noon, ash flecks on car hoods, everyone coughing and staying inside with the doors shut. | Anyone with asthma, heart trouble, or a young child should leave; the rest can stay indoors on filtered air, and watch for evacuation notices even though smoke this thick usually arrives from far away. |
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), Beachcomb (2,346 acres, 49.5 mi SSE), High Lava (1,981 acres, 37.0 mi N).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Outlines flown — Austin Aug 26 · The Narrows Aug 26. The oldest is Austin, 1 day behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 26, 7:06 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 worse (+18 on the likely worst day) across 18 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 evidence pack's terrain note is misleading and I am not using it: Mt Hood shields you from fires to the east, but the two fires that matter — The Narrows (13.9 mi SSW, 281 ac) and Austin (18.6 mi S, 8,781 ac), both 0% contained — are south and southwest of you, on the same west side of the crest, with no ridge in between. What is protecting you is not terrain but flow: every one of 156 ensemble member-days shows zero easterly wind on your dates against a 31% climatological rate, a 31-point negative departure, and the local forecast is light NNW/NW/W — which pushes the Austin and Narrows plumes southward, away from the house, while marine air and overnight fog suppress fire growth. That absence of offshore flow also removes the main engine of a west-slope blowup, so both the transport and the growth halves of the bad case are being argued against by the same signal. Against that, the monitor 8.7 miles away already reads 42 with the current fire load, the calibrated model puts the valley-bottom house around 60 (about 1.2x the ridgetop monitor, which is what you would expect from cold-air pooling), the season has been running twice as smoky as normal locally, and the forecast NNW wind actually puts the High Lava fire (37 mi N, 1,981 ac, 25% contained) mildly upwind — enough for persistent haze, far too diluted at that distance for an episode.
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 60, 48 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 281 acres · 0% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 8,781 acres · 0% contained |
| 22.2 mi | Grasshopper ESE | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 1,981 acres · 25% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 49.5 mi | Beachcomb SSE | 2,346 acres · 100% contained |
| 56.7 mi | Ten Mile SE | 4,834 acres · 100% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (Grasshopper) 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 | 19.4 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 | 16 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 29 mi · High Lava |
| 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 | 13 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 14 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 10 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 160 Bad | Moderate | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/27/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/27/26 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 2026-08-31 | 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 27 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 60 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 US AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average — specifically the highest 24-hour-average AQI value touching each calendar day, at the house in Welches, on the local monitor scale a phone app would display. I have applied no bias correction of my own; the pack's numbers were already calibrated, and I used the 0.2 factor only to read the model's raw at-house value as roughly 60 on that same monitor scale. 'Worst day of trip' is the maximum of those three daily values, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.