Upstate New York bears the brunt of the state’s smoke pollution.

Air quality alerts were in place in several upstate New York cities on Thursday afternoon as the plume of wildfire smoke drifted east. Officials in Buffalo — the state’s second most populous city, on the banks of Lake Erie — said that conditions had improved since Wednesday, but cautioned that the city remained under an air quality alert. In Rochester, on Lake Ontario, officials distributed masks at a local jazz festival on Wednesday night, and the airport was still reporting “widespread haze” on Thursday. In the Hudson Valley, where picturesque...