Wildfire smoke again headed for region

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection declared a statewide Code Red Air Quality Action Day for particulate matter (PM2.5) for today.

By MEGAN SWIFT
TribLive

Wildfire smoke will once again descend on Western Pennsylvania, reducing air quality through the rest of the week.

Local residents could be among the roughly 100 million people in the U.S. facing unhealthy air quality from Wednesday to Friday, mainly across the Midwest and East, the Washington Post reported.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection declared a statewide Code Red Air Quality Action Day for particulate matter (PM2.5) for today.

Residents are strongly encouraged to check www. airnow.gov for current conditions in their area.

During Code Red Air Quality Alerts all residents should consider limiting their outdoor activities, and sensitive groups such as children, elderly residents, and those with respiratory illnesses should avoid long or intense outdoor activities and consider moving activities indoors.

The smoke is from the wildfires raging across northern Minnesota and western Ontario in Canada, according to the Post. The largest fire, in Wabakimi Provincial Park, which is about 135 miles north of the northern shores of Lake Superior, had grown to more than 130,000 acres as of late Tuesday.

Jason Frazier, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Moon, said on Wednesday there was a milky, hazy sky instead of the typical bright blue on a clear day.

“The only impact that we’ve really been seeing so far is an increase of some of that smoke higher up in the atmosphere,” he told Trib-Live. “Typically without clouds, you see this nice blue sky.”

But as Thursday unfolds, that smoke will make its way lower and be present near the surface, impacting visibility and air quality in the Pittsburgh region, Frazier said.

“Visibility-wise, it won’t really create a ton of impact,” he said, likening it to more of an inconvenience of not being able to see the Pittsburgh city skyline as clearly. “It won’t be low enough to impact traffic.”

Frazier said the main local impact Thursday will be the degradation of air quality — especially for sensitive groups with respiratory issues.

“Particulate matter of the smoke rise to levels that create issues for those groups,” he said. “It may become a period where sensitive individuals may have to limit their outdoor activities.”

Southwestern Pennsylvania could be in the “unhealthy” air quality category, which is 151 to 200, meaning “members of the general public may experience health effects,” according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration smoke model predictions and Environmental Protection Agency thresholds.

But Northwestern Pennsylvania, including the Erie area, could be in the “very unhealthy” category, which is 201 to 300, meaning “the risk of health effects is increased for all.”

With a heat dome already hitting the East Coast, the Post said there will be little wind to blow the wildfire smoke away, and it will settle down toward the ground as conditions deteriorate toward the end of the week.

Length unknown

While Frazier believes smoke concentrations may peak later Thursday afternoon into the evening, linger in the area until Friday and potentially clear out for the weekend, conditions are still up in the air.

“Some of our available modeling to predict this doesn’t go out long enough,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t stay at the surface, we will continue to have winds coming from the northwest.

“We’re kind of downstream from where the fires are.”

As long as fires are still raging, Frazier said there could still be hazy skies — even into next week.

If rain extinguishes the wildfires, Frazier said smoke impacts in Western Pennsylvania would diminish and could disappear altogether.

“This is all predicated on those wildfires actually persisting into next week,” he said.

The worst wildfire smoke in recent memory was in June 2023 due to wildfires in Quebec, transforming the sky into an orange haze.

Local residents should pay attention to the Allegheny and Pennsylvania departments of environmental protection today, Frazier said, as they will be monitoring air quality systems and issuing air quality alerts.

The site AirNow.gov can also be a resource to personally monitor, he said.