Sitting in my office at the UW, I started to smell smoke. Wildfire smoke.
A view from Seattle's Space Needle showed the startingly smoky conditions:
And the latest air quality measurements from PurpleAir indicates degraded (yellow) and bad (red) air quality from Seattle to the South Sound. Yuk.
A plot of the particle level over south Tacoma shows a rapid rise during the past few hours
And even Yarrow Point (north of Bellevue) shows rapidly increasing values.
The smoke is clearly coming from the Bear Gulch Fire on the southeast side of the Olympic Peninsula.
Unfortunately, the winds are favorable for moving smoky air from near the fire to Puget Sound.
To show you, here is the predicted path of the air ending over Seattle at 5 PM today. The air near the storm started over the southern Olympics.
If you are vulnerable to smoke, you might want to avoid intense exercise outside and move inland to a facility/home with air filtration.
Seems like the same spots been getting all thr lightning and rain from tstorms here in Okanogan county. Been lucky for most part with fires, but a few homes have been lost. For us it's been pleasantly mostly smoke free. Also, Cliff, did you see that Helion started groundwork in Malaga for their Fusion plant. Hope to have it running by 2028. Exciting times.
ReplyDeleteCliff, can you please give us an explanation of why we are experiencing this today but barely any smoke yesterday? I feel like the conditions were pretty similar (marine push), in which case shouldn't we have had the same smoke yesterday?
ReplyDeleteIs there any way to know how long these conditions will last? Is the wind going to change direction soon?
ReplyDeleteQuestion. What are odds of a heat wave / smoke storm on or after Labor Day like we had back in 2020 ?
ReplyDeleteJust want to mention the WA smoke blog, if folks want to keep up with smoke impacts and forecasts throughout the season https://wasmoke.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteCliff, I’d love to hear your take on the surface water drought that I read about in this article. Last month I told my wife the river levels on waterways like the Tilton might go dry this year because it was the lowest I’d ever seen it at this time of the year. That was a month ago and I think my prediction might be right! Lowest levels since records began in the 1920’s according to this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.chronline.com/stories/lewis-county-experiencing-drought-like-conditions-to-start-of-summer,384948?