(MADISON, Wisconsin) – Smoke from Canadian wildfires generated health alerts across the Upper Midwest and Montana for the second year in a row.
Fires raging in British Columbia and Alberta filled the skies with haze over parts of Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin on Sunday, lasting into Monday morning.
Unhealthy levels of air pollution mean everyone in Minnesota should stay home and avoid extensive outdoor exertion until at least noon Monday, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said in its first statewide warning of air quality for the season on Sunday.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said air quality was unhealthy for sensitive people in several counties in the northern two-thirds of the state on Sunday. The warnings were scheduled to end at noon Monday.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was also under hazy skies on Monday. Some people reported smelling smoke, said Joe Phillips, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Marquette, Michigan.
Prevailing winds could send smoke south and east to Iowa and Chicago, leaving skies looking milky late Tuesday or early Wednesday, said Rafal Ogorek, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office. in Chicago. Most of the smoke was expected to remain over Minnesota, Wisconsin and northern Michigan, hovering between a mile and two miles above the ground.
A record number of forest fires in 2023, it forced more than 235,000 people across Canada to evacuate and sent thick smoke into parts of the US, prompting hazy skies and health warnings in several US cities.
There were 200 fires in Canada in mid-May last year, compared with 90 fires this Sunday, said Dave Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, a government environmental protection agency. A fire raging near Fort Nelson in far northeastern British Columbia forced evacuations.
The chances of more wildfires this summer appear high. Lightning strikes can trigger rapidly spreading fires in forests experiencing intense drought in northeastern British Columbia, northwestern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories, according to the Canadian National Wildland Fire Situation report.
An analysis by World Weather Attribution, an initiative that aims to quickly assess the role of climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather events, concluded that climate change has more than doubled the odds of hot, dry weather that helped fuel the fire season.
Loretta Mickley, co-leader of the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard University, said her group did papers in 2013 and 2015 looking at fire activity and ecosystems with an eye toward the future. She said the increase in fire activity is consistent with the warming climate.
Drought conditions appear to be less severe in Ontario and Quebec in the coming months, but temperatures are expected to be warmer than normal and it is difficult to predict whether humidity will cancel out the heat, she said.
“What will happen this summer? It depends on what the weather is like today and what happened during the winter,” she said. “In some regions, a lot of rain in winter generated abundant vegetation. If this is followed by drought or drought, then all that vegetation will be ready to burn and provide fuel for the fires.”
If Canada sees a repeat of last year’s fire season, it’s not at all clear whether the U.S. will have haze on the scale of 2023. Fires in Quebec and Ontario produced most of the smoke that has enveloped the eastern U.S. — but those regions They rarely see such large fires. Instead of pushing the smoke west, the wind carried it south, blanketing the eastern borough of the United States in haze, from the Mississippi River Valley to Manhattan.
“It was a strange and unfortunate weather pattern where there were winds encouraging the air to come south and then east,” said Phillips of the Canadian Environmental Protection Agency. “And it was just a shock to meteorologists and to the world and to everyone who had to endure this… I think it will be a fraction of the concern as it was last year.”
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Associated Press writers Rick Callahan in Indianapolis, Rob Gillies in Toronto and Steve Karnowski in St. Paul, Minnesota, contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
