Wildfires & Smoke
Wildfires
Watch Duty is a non-profit site that provides a map that aggregates fire information from multiple jurisdictions.
If it seems they are lagging behind, Cal Fire Incidents (map layout vs list) has information on fires managed by California. If the fire is being managed federally it will show up on Inciweb, check their map view or their Table of Incidents.
Wildland Fires & Smoke has a lot of useful information about both fires and air quality.
Gaia GPS has layers for satellite heat detection and current wildfires for free users on both their web and mobile apps.
Caltopo has corresponding map overlays for free users as well: fire activity and GOES 17 live fire detection.
Webcams
AlertCalifornia by UC San Diego has hundreds of webcams around the state, and their angle of view will even be highlighted on a map when selected! You can zoom in and scroll around the map and the previews along the side will automatically be filtered, giving a great at a glance view of visibility in a region.
Yosemite and SEKI have a collection of webcams that show areas of their park, some of which have hourly screenshots you can skim. The SEKI page has a lot of dead links to outside sources as of summer 2024.
Mammoth Mountain has a lot of realtime/live webcams because they're fancy.
The Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District has a lot of webcams for Owens Valley. Bishopweather has a webcam pointed towards Mt. Humphreys, Basin Mountain, and Mt. Tom from Bishop, CA.
WhitneyPortal has a zoomed in webcam aimed at a peak. Guess which?
Smoke & Air Quality Level Monitoring
AirNow Interactive Air Map Quality gives you nice rounded (projected) shapes for different AQI levels as well as the official AirNow high quality sensors.
AirNow Fire & Smoke Map you can now get the high quality (but slower updating) AirNow sensors combined with Purple Air's lower quality but faster updating ones in a single map! Purple Air's Map still has more sensors than the combined version above.
Windy has wind & air quality predictions 3 days out. The further out they are, the less useful they are, and fires can create and alter their own patterns, but it's at least a good general idea of what to expect. You can get a longer view out on just wind patterns. If you open the detailed forecast bottom panel there's a floating button above it for webcams in vincinity which can be useful.
Weather.gov Experimental Smoke Forecast includes a 24 hour prediction of smoke coverage, though rather zoomed out.
NASA's Worldview and BlueSky Daily Runs are great visual tools to show how smoke spread recently.
Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District covers Inyo & Mono.
San Joaquin Valley Air Piollution Control District covers some of the southern Sierra and surrounding areas.
California Smoke Information is an outreach point that multiple CA agencies use.
Historical burn areas
Caltopo allows free / anonymous members to check historical burn layers with their fire history map layer.
If you're a premium member of Gaia you can use their historical wildfire layer to see where past fires have been.