Posted on 07/19/2021 4:59:39 PM PDT by Right Wing Vegan
PITTSBURGH — A Code Orange Air Quality Action Day alert has been issued for Tuesday for most of western Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said smoke from the Canadian wildfires along with light winds will contribute to concentrations of fine particulate matter on Tuesday.
That would be me here in Western Pa. It was a weird hazy today, likely from the smoke.
Here in Inland Northwest and North Idaho, we are having an epic hot, dry spring and summer. The air is almost nonstop smoky haze. It's not as bad as a couple years ago, but it is pretty bad. Converting to windmills, solar cells, and electric cars will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to end this miserable air pollution. Well, that isn't true. That will make electricity unaffordable and unreliable, so keeping your house at a nice temperature and running your air though filters will be prohibitively expensive.
Thanks, liberal kooks for making our lives so much better.
Here is a good one for tracking fires using satellites.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=6dc469279760492d802c7ba6db45ff0e
I also live in Western Pa and I was out and about today wearing shades and saw no haze. Nice sunny 82 temp with intermittent cloud cover.
There are only three ways to do it. Clear the brush and deadwood, can be difficult in steep terrain. Get loggers to log it and require them to clear the slash and brush. Let the fires burn in the spring (instead of putting them out like they do now), and light more.
The third one will give you some smoke. Doing nothing will also give you smoke from catastrophic fires. The second and third solutions are the cheapest.
One thing to keep in mind is that different approaches are taken in Canada, we have not had the same activist or legislative pressure here to leave vegetation intact in hydro-electric corridors for example (so these are generally devoid of any brush having been clear cut), and there has been ongoing attempts to clear out interface areas to prevent spread of forest fires into populated areas. This has worked to some extent. A lot of these current fires are miles from populated areas and have broken out after lightning storms following weeks of extreme heat.
Western Canada has always had a lot of summer forest fires, the thing that is a bit different this year is that the jet stream is dipping further south than it often does across the eastern half of North America so the smoke is being transported into the northeastern states instead of through eastern Canada which is the more normal route.
Temperatures have been 7 to 10 (F) deg above normal in this region since mid-June and there has been almost no rain even with thunderstorms over mountains, so it’s no wonder that there are a lot of fires. Our normal high temperature at this time of year is around 85 F, the past thirty days have averaged 101 F. And some places have had zero rainfall with this. The only good thing about the fire fight is that winds have been generally light allowing crews to keep on them, if it got windy in this situation we would be looking at a real disaster.
Some of them may even be setting many of these fires.
Where are you located? What you describe is what we have here in North Idaho — hardly any rain after March, temps consistently 10 to 15 over normal. Nonstop hot and dry. We had a dry lightning storm move through the Inland NW that ignited a bunch of fires all over Washington, Idaho, Oregon and BC a couple weeks ago.
Late this afternoon in western North Dakota, the smog settled down in the Badlands cutting visibility to about 5 miles. The U.S. Government needs to take Canada to task for its criminal forest management.
There ought to be Climate Change finds levied against Canada for that outrage.
Perhaps I’m further north than you might be.
I am located just to the west of the Idaho northern border strip, more like due north of Spokane WA and about five miles inside Canada. There’s a weather station near us called Warfield which seems to be a bit hotter on average than Colville WA but the numbers are fairly similar.
There is a large fire burning in the south Okanagan near the U.S. border now, so would expect an increase in smoke generally from that source.
Lots of cloud around tonight, not sure how much is actual cloud and how much is smoke, but only the moon is visible, no stars or planets. It feels oppressively warm with the heat not getting out like it usually does with our mountain air and clear skies.
“… oppressively warm with the heat not getting out like it usually does with our mountain air and clear skies.”
Yep, that describes us near CdA, too. No end in sight, either.
Thank you! That is excellent. The link from there that shows evacuations is a very useful tool on top of the other good features.
I like your first link because it shows where the smoke plumes are coming from specifically as well as forecasting where they are going and how dense they may be.
I’ve been seeing pix on weather forums from NYC and region, showing how smoky the air is there, and the odd thing is that here (within 200-300 miles of most of the fires) the sky today is quite clear and the smoke haze factor has dropped to maybe 1 on the 10 point scale (the other day it was 3-4 and it has been as high as 6-7, not as bad as in 2018 when it was occasionally 9-10). It is also very hot here again, near 100F which is quite a bit above our normal July daytime high of 86 or so.
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