More days with haze and poor air quality from Canadian wildfires are becoming the new normal for New Hampshire and much of the Northeast during the summer and early fall.

So far in 2025, the Department of Environmental Services has issued eight air quality alerts. Of those, six were issued because of increased levels of fine particle air pollution all caused by wildfires in Canada, which is on track to have its second-most devastating wildfire season on record .

Air quality specialists in New Hampshire are looking more closely at those trends than ever before, and health professionals are becoming more concerned about the effects of air pollution.

Up until the last four or five years, state air quality scientist Kathleen Simmons said that monitoring wildfires because of their potent

See Full Page