Valley Smoke Plumes

Information about my Atmospheric Sciences 101 class below
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The visible satellite imagery this morning was fascinating, with smoke in mountain valleys jetting out into the lowlands.

There are two fires on the eastern side of the North Cascades (Sugarloaf and Labor Mountain fires...see map below)

 

With sea-level pressure higher on the eastern side of the Cascades than over western Washington, the smoke is being pushed westward through the Cascade Passes and then jetting out into western Washington.

You can see this in the visible satellite image this morning around 9 AM, with smoke pouring westward in Stevens Pass and pushing out into Snohomish County north of Seattle.

The Seattle PanoCam this morning, looking north around sunrise, dramatically showed off the smoke plume.  Kind of beautiful.

This plume created a localized region of poor air quality that pushed into western Washington, north and east of Seattle.  Another smoke plume moved westward through the near-sea-level Columbia Gorge (red and purple are the worst air quality).

Look at the air quality at Gold Bar, west of Stevens Pass. You can see the sudden increase in smoky air this morning after midnight.  Not a good time to go on a hike in the pass! 

Even more impressive, the vertical laser profiler at Marysville showed the dense smoke moving aloft last evening, being densest between 500 and 1800 meters (1600-6000 ft).  Yuk.

Turning to the Olympic Peninsula, some smoke from the Bear Gulch Fire moved southward before taking a hard turn to the west (see visible satellite image below)

Some of the smoke was evident far offshore around noon today:

The good news is that by Thursday, the winds will reverse (be out of the west) and the smoke will be pushed back into eastern Washington.

Furthermore, by next Monday, rain and stormy conditions will move in...and that should essentially end the wildfire season.  

As a teaser, below is the predicted precipitation total for the next ten days.

There will be no Western Washington fires after this.  

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Starting tomorrow, I will be teaching Atmospheric Sciences 101, which you can take either in person or online.  

The description of the class is here: 

https://atmos.uw.edu/~cliff/ATMS101Y2025.html

For those over 60, you can take the class as an Access Student at a very low cost.  Here is information about the ACCESS program:

https://registrar.washington.edu/register/access/