Shalev Nessaiver's wife is in the third trimester of her pregnancy, so as the smoke has rolled in and out of Canberra each day, the pair have watched it closely.

"I am always hyper-aware right now of anything that could affect my wife and our developing child," Mr Nessaiver said.

"We had been hearing about the fires as some distant thing, but then it started blowing in, [and] the reports were kind of vague: 'Smoky haze will be in the Canberra region tomorrow.' Okay, great, but what does that mean for me?

"I wanted to be able to tell my wife, 'Here's when you can go outside, here's when you should stay in.'"

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Like much of New South Wales, Canberra has been wheezing through thick smoke haze for more than a fortnight.

But being an educator in data science by day, and a natural tinkerer, Mr Nessaiver figured there must be a way to find out exactly when, where and how badly the smoke was hitting Canberra.

So he took it upon himself to hunt down the data and build a forecaster that could make those predictions.

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"I started investigating and it's pretty straightforward, we know what the facts are, what the wind patterns are," he said.

"There's a lot of good information and, if you know where to look, you can find it and that's okay, but most people aren't going to do what I'm doing — look at all these different graphs, all these different things."

Mr Nessaiver has pulled together wind data, fire location data and satellite imagery to build a picture of what the smoke is likely to do to Canberra.

When he realised other people would want to know all the information he was providing for his wife, Mr Nessaiver took it to the internet.

The response was immediate.

"People seem to find it really useful, it's gotten a lot of popularity in the last couple of days," he said.

"Most people just want the end result: Do I stay inside? Do I run around or not?"

For Mr Nessaiver, he ultimately decided it was better for him and his wife to get out of Canberra altogether.

"We moved our flights [to Melbourne] up a bit early, just because the whole weekend is going to be like this, it might even get worse again," he said.

"There's just no point in staying around in it."

ACT Health today upgraded its health advice due to the deterioration of air quality across the city.

Public health physician Dr Vanessa Johnston said extremely high temperatures and a lack of wind were contributing to the lingering smoke.

"We are strongly advising people more vulnerable to these conditions to take extra care," she said.