2023-06-08 12:30:30
Heavy smoke blanketed the northeastern United States for the second day in a row on Wednesday, turning the air orange and yellow-gray and prompting advisories to stay home and keep windows closed. The smoke comes from dozens of forest fires burning in various provinces of Canada.
Much of the air was in the “unhealthy or worse categories in areas ranging from the Mid-Atlantic to the Northeast and parts of the Great Lakes,” according to a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advisory. for its acronym in English) on Wednesday night.
Federal authorities in the United States issued air quality alerts in several regions and the smoke is expected to persist for days.
Conditions were particularly bad in parts of central New York state, where soot particulates reached dangerous levels. In New York City, authorities said Wednesday that everyone should stay home. The smoke arrived late Tuesday afternoon, obscuring views of New Jersey across the Hudson River.
WHERE DOES THE SMOKE COME FROM?
The fires started due to the unrelenting unusually hot and arid conditions.
The Quebec metropolitan area fires are large and relatively close — between 500 and 600 miles (800 to 970 kilometers) — to Rhode Island, following other blazes in Nova Scotia.
Its smoke has drifted into the United States since last month. The most recent fires near Quebec have been burning for several days.
“The month of May was out of the ordinary, high temperatures at record levels across much of Canada,” said Eric James, a modeling expert with the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences who also collaborates with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office (NOAA, for its initials in English).
“I don’t recall fires of this magnitude in the last 10 years,” James said.
A warming planet means more intense and prolonged heat waves, leading to bigger and smokier fires, according to Joel Thornton, professor and chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.
WHY DOES THE SMOKE GET SO FAR AWAY?
Strong winds in the upper atmosphere can carry smoke great distances, and it is common for large, violent fires to create unsanitary conditions hundreds of kilometers from where forests burn.
But for the smoke to cover some of the major cities in the United States, the right circumstances had to be in place: A hot, dry spring was the first step. The weather did the rest, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with Yale Climate Change Connections.
In Canada, air circulates counterclockwise around a low pressure system near Nova Scotia. That sends air south over the fires in Quebec. There, the air picks up the smoke, and then turns east over New York State, carrying the smoke to the East Coast.
“It’s just a matter of track record,” Henson explained. “Smoke goes where the wind takes it.”
This wind pattern isn’t particularly unusual, but the confluence of events is.
“Unfortunately, this weather pattern coincides with a situation conducive to large fires,” Thornton noted.
Weather patterns change and the most severe conditions should only last a day or two. However, some of the smoke could linger for a week or more.
WHAT EXACTLY IS SMOKE?
Although smoke looks familiar, it’s actually made up of a complex mix of shapes, from round to corkscrew-shaped under a microscope. “It’s not just one type of chemical,” said Rima Habre, an air quality and exposure science expert at the University of Southern California. “It can have gases, carbons and toxic metals.” It changes as it travels, and may also contain ozone, she noted.
Much of what we see in the air and measure is small particles, or PM 2.5. They are so small that they can get into the lungs, where oxygen enters the circulation. “What worries us the most is inflammation of the lungs,” Habre said, due to these high levels of contamination. But with climate change intensifying fires, she is increasingly concerned that more people will be exposed to less extreme smoke for weeks or months.
“Most healthy adults and children will recover quickly from smoke exposure and have no lasting health effects,” according to the EPA advisory. But this is less true for a wide variety of people, such as children whose lungs are still developing, the elderly, and people with lung diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The recommendation is to stay indoors, with doors, windows, and fireplaces closed. Recirculating air conditioning can help filter some particles, and air filters can remove many more.
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