Hazy skies have been common due to wildfires. Why is this happening and will it be more common in the future?
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Feed | Omny Studio | All Of Our Podcasts From the Midwest to the Northeast, many in the U.S. have been dealing with the smoke from the record breaking Canadian wildfires for over a month now. Hazy skies have been common and extremely low air quality has occurred in spots.
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
That you know, that's what she said. Even down by, you know, our office closer to Atlantic City. It was a it looked like a cloudy day out. I mean, like with no sun whatsoever. It looked just like a dark, a dreary day out there. You could still smell the wildfire smoke as well. And you know, if you smell the wildfire smoke, it's kind of already through like those those articles that aren't good for you to breathe in are already getting into your system.
Yeah. And you know, well, we we just wanted to dive into all of this deeper so, you know, why are Canada's wildfires so bad this year? Why has so much of the smoke ended up over the U.S.? What are the short term and long term impacts from this smoke exposure? And, you know, we found the perfect guests for this episode helps answer all our questions.
I have been interested in the weather from the time I was a child. I was ten when Hurricane Bob came through Rhode Island. I'm originally from the East Coast, though. I live in Colorado now, and I was fascinated, impressed, amazed at the ability to predict something like that and to and to prepare for that level of a natural disaster.
And I think that really helps me understand them more deeply. So I, I experienced the phenomenon. I have sort of this local understanding of how it's impacting people and it's sort of connected to a broader picture. So fires fall in that category. And some of the other things that I work on also fall in that category. There they stand this local to national to international space.
Where I am in South Jersey. It wasn't quite orange, but it was very, very easy. And it has been really since the middle of May, both with Alberta wildfires. And then what's happening in Quebec and Ontario, in Nova Scotia here, I guess that is 360 view like what actually caused the smoke to recede? Unprecedented levels, you know, in the northeast, because it's not like we haven't seen wildfire smoke before, at least here in northeast.
So that's as simple as it is. And the smoke from wildfires is injecting in various levels of the atmosphere throughout the day in the early morning. And, you know, overnight it's injecting lower in the atmosphere as it grows throughout the day, it tends to inject higher.
Yeah. So the compounds in smoke that you can smell, they have a lifetime of about a day. So when you can smell the smoke, it's often more concentrated and fresher. And when you can't smell the smoke, but you see that haze, it usually just means it's been processed in the atmosphere for over a day. So it's it's taken longer than a day to get to you.
I mean, it's not that it's not important, but the conditions of the land that surround it will really govern how much how fast it spreads and how far it spreads. So can I get you to riff on that just a little bit? Is that kind of kind of the right idea? Yes, on you're totally right. And in fact, my group has has worked on this and I can talk a little bit about that.
And one thing the second thing that we know very well over North America is that in general it will be drier. And so that just that alone will facilitate more periods of time where large fires could occur. And and yes, so it's interesting, you know, in the West, there's been a lot of work, right, to educate people about fire safety and and to be careful with ignition sources, but particularly in in certain times of year.
So we're talking about like the Carr Fire, the Mendocino complex, some of these really, really big wildfires. And so what we would do was go behind the wildfire or upwind of the fire and see what was happening and figure out the background atmosphere that the smoke was, that the fire was injecting the smoke into. And then we would come around downwind of the the fire and we would as soon as it was safe.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio They are generally what we call organic carbon. So these are chemical compounds with urban carbon bonds. It's a we don't have perfect characterization of of chemically of exactly all of that, but most of the aerosol has organic carbon and then you have a lot of carbon containing gases. So there's lots of carbon monoxide, for example, anytime you have incomplete combustion.
Does that help? Yes, I figured it was going to be a little bit more complex than we think. I know there are a lot of different elements that make up smoke, but also when you were describing flying through the smoke, it reminded me a lot of some of the hurricane hunters that we've had on this podcast. It's been very similar going back and forth through the hurricane, back and forth, through the wildfire smoke.
There were these beautiful cumulus fields, right? And we would go sample the smoke under them and then move up into these little puffy clouds and try to collect the cloud droplets. So we were taking the plane and going zooming cloud to cloud. And, you know, I was in the cockpit. So not getting as sick as I would have gotten.
And Emily, one of the things that came up in my research for this episode is that you and your family actually had to flee from the Cameron Peak fire while backpacking in 2020. Now, I assume is pretty scary. So can you describe that experience? So 2020, right. The pandemic summer, we were looking for things to do with the kids we had.
And so we just grabbed our children's hands and we ran out. And my daughter, who's eight now, was five at the time, and she ran six and a half miles and about two and a half hours. And it was this. Thankfully, the smoke was running parallel to us so we could see the massive plume. And I didn't know what was going to happen.
And it just you know, I watched that every incident management report every single night for that. And it burns, you know, right through in October. And it basically burned until it snowed. And so we it started in August and it just continued on. And that smoke was sort of covering Fort Collins. And it would was just very smoky here.
This is what this feels like. And at the same time, there was some really great work happening to try to understand the return cycle for events like that and that maybe 6 to 8 years. And that's a horrible type summer to have every six years. So, so I feel like that experience.
Well, there's a few things to think about with respect to this general question. And the first one is, while I do not want to diminish the risk of these fires and my family has run from a wildfire, and there's incredibly sad loss of life and property associated with wildfires. So I do not want to diminish that.
She's like, I have the windows open. And I was like, nope, no, no, you don't like close those up. And I'm in the ship. Use some air filters and this is how you're going to make yourself a clean air space in case those winds shift that plume a little bit further north. Because at the time it was just a little bit in southern Rhode Island and was more to the south.
And we're trying to offer information on fires, on drought, on all the way to what do I do in my own home, to decarbonize it. We're offering, you know, all of that in one sort of space for mothers. And so you can find out about that at science moms dot com and there's videos of me and my colleagues, you know trying to explain things and trying to offer helpful advice and we, you know, showcase some of technologies too, and show how we use them.
But what's kind of a silver lining that you see to trying to help relax people and focus on solutions and what we can do to help mitigate the risk if we're going to see increased wildlife or what kind of stuff can we do to handle that situation. You know, what is your response to somebody who's feeling a little uneasy?
And it's very, very important and it's something that anyone can do. So, yes, it's the only thing, you know, I would say if you have children, be careful about how you talk about climate change to children. With my own kids, I tell them this isn't a weight that you have to carry right now. This is an adult problem and I'm working on it.
Well and we thank you so much for joining the podcast and hopefully we can have you back on again soon. I would love to. This has been really fun. Great. Well, going to take one more quick break, but we're going to be back with some closing thoughts in just a second. So stay tuned. More across the sky. I mean, and we're back on across the sky.
And I you know, like she said, it was the biggest fire in Colorado's history. I mean, you know, that's something I lose a deer for a while. And she definitely made mention of that. Yeah, That was, you know, really a great story. And just the you know, the kind of take away for me is that, you know, after we dealt with what we saw over the Northeast, but again, we've been dealing with it in the Midwest as well, just all the talk, it just seems like, you know, never at this level.
So thank you for the email and if you have a comment about the show or have a weather question you'd like us to answer, send us an email at podcasts at Lee Dot Net Podcasts at we dot net. Or if you'd like to hear your voice on the podcast, fix a voicemail by calling 60927270996092727099. We'd love to hear from you.
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