{"id":35490,"date":"2023-06-29T07:30:39","date_gmt":"2023-06-29T07:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=35490"},"modified":"2026-07-10T02:43:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T02:43:20","slug":"usa-canada-wildfires-cause-smoky-scenes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2023\/06\/29\/usa-canada-wildfires-cause-smoky-scenes\/","title":{"rendered":"USA: Canada wildfires cause smoky scenes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from\u00a0eye-watering dangerous smok<\/strong>\u00a0e from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity from a southern heat wave that has\u00a0already proven deadly<\/strong>, forecasters say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And then the smoke will likely come back to the Midwest and East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because neither the 235 out-of-control Canadian wildfires nor the stuck weather pattern that\u2019s responsible for this mess of meteorological maladies are showing signs of relenting for the next week or longer, according to meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s Weather Prediction Center.\u00a0
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First, the stuck weather pattern made abnormally hot and dry conditions for Canada to burn at off-the-chart record levels. Then it created a setup where the only relief comes when low pressure systems roll through, which means areas on one side get smoky air from the north and the other gets sweltering air from the south.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smoke or heat. \u201cPick your poison,\u201d said prediction center forecast operations chief Greg Carbin. \u201cThe conditions are not going to be very favorable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs long as those fires keep burning up there, that\u2019s going to be a problem for us,\u201d Carbin said. \u201cAs long as there\u2019s something to burn, there will be smoke we have to deal with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Take St. Louis. The city had two days of unhealthy air Tuesday and Wednesday, but for Thursday \u201cthey\u2019ll get an improvement of air quality with the very hot and humid heat,\u201d said weather prediction center meteorologist Bryan Jackson. The forecast is for temperatures that feel like 109 degrees (42.8 degrees Celsius) \u2014 with 101 degree (38.3 degrees Celsius) heat and stifling humidity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Wednesday, the low pressure system was parked over New England and because winds go counter-clockwise, areas to the west \u2013 such as Chicago and the Midwest \u2013 get smoky winds from the north, while areas east of the low pressure get southerly hot winds, Jackson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As that low pressure system moves on and another one travels over the central Great Plains and Lake Superior, the Midwest gets temporary relief, Jackson said. But when low pressure moves on, the smoke comes back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have this this carousel of air cruising around the Midwest, and every once in a while is bringing the smoke directly onto whatever city you live in,\u201d said University of Chicago atmospheric scientist Liz Moyer. \u201cAnd while the fires are ongoing, you can expect to see these periodic bad air days and the only relief is either when the fires go out or when the weather pattern dies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stuck weather pattern is \u201cawfully unusual,\u201d said NOAA\u2019s Carbin who had to look back in records to 1980 to see anything even remotely similar. \u201cWhat gets me is the persistence of this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is the weather pattern stuck? This seems to be happening more often<\/strong> \u2014 and some scientists suggest that human-caused climate change<\/strong> causes more situations where weather patterns stall. Moyer and Carbin said it\u2019s too soon to tell if that\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Carbin and Canadian fire scientist Mike Flannigan said there\u2019s a clear climate signal in the Canadian fires. And they said those fires aren\u2019t likely to die down anytime soon, with nothing in the forecast that looks likely to change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly every province in Canada has fires burning. A record 30,000 square miles (80,000 square kilometers) have burned, an area nearly as large as South Carolina, according to the Canadian government.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And fire season usually doesn\u2019t really get going until July in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a crazy crazy year. It\u2019s unusual to have the whole country on fire,\u201d said Flannigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. \u201cUsually it\u2019s regional… not the whole shebang at once.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hotter than normal and drier air made for ideal fire weather, Flannigan said. Warmer weather from climate change means the atmosphere sucks more moisture out of plants, making them more likely to catch fire, burn faster and hotter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFires are all about extremes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And where there\u2019s fire, there\u2019s smoke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both high heat and smoky conditions are stressors on the body and can present potential challenges to human health, said Ed Avol, a professor emeritus at the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Avol added that while the haze of wildfire smoke provides a visual cue to stay inside, there can be hidden dangers of breathing in harmful pollutants such as ozone even when the sky looks clear. He also noted there are air chemistry changes that can happen downwind of wildfire smoke, which may have additional and less well-understood impacts on the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s still only June. The seasonal forecast for the rest of the summer in Canada \u201cis for hot and mostly dry\u201d and that\u2019s not good for dousing fires, Flannigan said. \u201cIt\u2019s a crazy year and I\u2019m not sure where it\u2019s going to end.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from\u00a0eye-watering dangerous smok\u00a0e from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity from a southern heat wave that has\u00a0already proven deadly, forecasters say. And then the smoke will likely come back to the Midwest and East. That\u2019s because neither the 235 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":35491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[10184,5268,12913,10446,2848,1953,11017,7960,854,9331,3862,7340,10505,10205,1258,8123,746,6159,2264,11537,12634,7356,5205,10303,10311,7964,11973,5617,10313,5278,6736,8943,9162,9271,11179,10838,10018,7333,9262,214,6348,9085,10310,6408,3954,594],"class_list":["post-35490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-air-quality","tag-british","tag-british-columbia","tag-burning","tag-california","tag-canada","tag-canadian","tag-case","tag-chicago","tag-city","tag-climate-change","tag-columbia","tag-die","tag-dies","tag-england","tag-eye","tag-feel","tag-fire","tag-government","tag-harmful","tag-health","tag-jackson","tag-july","tag-medicine","tag-midwest","tag-north","tag-one","tag-poison","tag-professor","tag-quality","tag-school","tag-scientist","tag-scientists","tag-sky","tag-smoke","tag-south-carolina","tag-southern-california","tag-summer","tag-united-states","tag-university","tag-us","tag-weather","tag-widfire","tag-wildfire","tag-will","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52197,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35490\/revisions\/52197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}