6 PM Update. Unfortunately, the Kp level just dropped to 4...which is not good. Will check again at 9 PM. It peaked too soon....
As a result of this increased Kp, the aurora was quite visible over Vancouver, BC late last night, where the clouds were absent (see below).
The latest NOAA Space Weather Center prediction forecast is for the Kp index to rise to nearly 8 tonight.....which would bring some auroral activity to WA state. No guarantees though!
Smoke over Washington
My last blog was wrong about smoke overhead. I noted that the Canadian smoke would miss us. That was correct, but I forgot to check about Asia!
The visible satellite image this AM clearly showed the smoke in a southwest-northeast band over eastern WA and western Oregon. Some smoke over SW BC.
Air quality was fine at the surface--this stuff was aloft.
Where did it come from?
Asia. The figure below shows a smoke analysis from a day ago. The Canadian wildfire smoke is heading south into the eastern US, but you can also see smoke from Asia moving across the Pacific.
That was the source of our smoke aloft.
When I was a kid, smoke from the Chinchaga fire in Canada caused a red sun and then darkness in western Pennsylvania and across much of the eastern USA.
ReplyDeletehttps://blog.newspapers.com/september-24-30-1950-the-great-smoke-pall/
Were you living here a few years ago? That summer we had fire smoke that dropped visibility to less than 1 mile in places. You could find ash deposited on your car from fires 100's of miles away. Just awful.
DeleteWhy are Canada and Asia having fires so early? After all, the snow in the boreal forests must have melted only a few weeks ago- at the earliest.
ReplyDelete"Everybody" keeps saying that climate change equals drought... I thought that, as the oceans get (a little) warmer, there should be more evaporation and then, necessarily, more precipitation!