Smoke and haze

[Dick Berg]

Here in central NY we're in quite the bad way for the smoke and haze as a result of the Canadian forest fires in Quebec province. This has been going on for s few days by now. We have had so much smoke today that the visibility iss down to maybe a mile at ground level. And it smells like a campfire, even in the house with all the windows closed. The sun is dull orange, though it is "clear" out.

The gray color of the smoke can be seen on the NOAA GOES16 satellite images from a few minutes ago of the mid-Atlantic region. It's been "clear" (so says my Boltwood) for days but now there are clouds moving in on top of the smoke. Hopefully some rain will wash some of the smoke out of the air:

smoke.png

The air quality is past "purple" here, where it's normally not even "yellow." https://www.airnow.gov/ [for my zipcode 13045]:

AQI.png

The smoke is mostly supposed to clear up during Friday. Hope so. It would be nice to open the observatory again.

We are not devastated by fires here in New York, just bothered by the smoke. But this is certainly brings to mind how terrible the forest fires in the West must be and how so many people have suffered because of them.

[Bob Denny]

We are not devastated by fires here in New York, just bothered by the smoke. But this is certainly brings to mind how terrible the forest fires in the West must be and how so many people have suffered because of them.

The ones in the western US and Canada have been fairly widespread for many years (I can remember back 40+ years myself). It is, after all, a fire-dependent ecology, with lightning-caused "slow burn" fires being critical to tree reproduction (cones pop seeds from heat). However, particularly in California, the well-meaning environment advocates have forced the agencies (US National Park Service, US Forest Service, and California Department of Forestry) to allow forests to become dangerously choked with fuel.

In contrast, we just came down this morning from the AZ high country (7,000 ft) through the the Coconino National Forest. There were several prescribed burns in progress. For 2 hours we passed through Coconino Forest that has been thinned and otherwise cared for. Beautiful. Elsewhere in the west, this is also the case where our national forests are cared for. The turning point for professional wildfire management was the 1988 Yellowstone Park complex of 800,000 acres. The super aggressive firefighting that was previously the policy caused the forests to become choked with downed timber and undergrowth fuel, resulting in the explosive crown fires that moved fast and created an unnatural scorched earth. Unfortunately some regions still haven't applied the lessons.

I tried to find some non-political info on what seems like an early rash of fires in Quebec, but I couldn't find anything on the land management topic, I just find a lot of stories about how bad the smoke is, and that "climate change" is the cause :-0).