I’m in Dutchess County, NY, halfway between Albany and NYC. Current air index is 200. The severity comes and goes a bit as in some of the other places mentioned, but there’s a definite smoky smell throughout. I wouldn’t describe it as acrid or even particularly heavy, but it’s there.
I went out for my usual three-mile “exercise walk,” which may not have been all that bright but that’s what I did. No particular issues with breathing and I was able to keep to my usual pace. The sky is gray with occasional weak sun poking through; what I found interesting was that while there is no obvious red in the sky, there is a powerful reddish cast to the sunlight where it reaches the ground when the clouds and trees allow it to peek through. Kind of uncanny. Couldn’t quite capture the full redness on my camera phone, but it’s definitely there.
You folks in Syracuse and the Finger Lakes have it much worse; I’m thinking of you (along with those in places that are similarly affected). Hope it eases soon.
I’m visiting the suburbs east of Toronto. It was bad here yesterday morning, but the haze and smoke subsided by afternoon. Today there’s some haziness, and a smoke smell which is a bit different. Yesterday it was more like a wood fire but today there’s a chemical smell, almost like burning rubber.
Meanwhile my family in NYC has been texting me about how bad it is there, worse than here in terms of haziness and air quality indices.
I can’t smell it (in Boston, where the haze has been off and on, but I haven’t noticed a lot of smell) but I’d guess the fire has got into the peat, which has a very distinctive and unpleasant odor. And once that stuff gets going it can smolder for months, sometimes requiring a snowpack to put it out.
@Eyebrows_0f_Doom can you tell me where I can look up numbers for different NYC ZIP codes? The www.airnow.gov site seems to have just one number for every NYC ZIP. I tried putting in ZIPs for varied locations, from midtown to Riverdale to City Island to Douglaston, and all I get is 392
In Queens. . According to https://www.airnow.gov/ my zip code is 413. It’s been hazy since yesterday, but now I can smell it and I didn’t this morning,
Just saw @gkster 's post It’s giving me the same number for every NYC zip code I try.
That’s what shows up in Apple’s Weather app under the AQI. You can search by zip code and get differing levels. But they don’t appear to match the airnow.gov one which shows the same level for all of NYC.
It’s a little over 150 in the MD suburbs of DC. My son lives in Ithaca NY, where it’s at 415. He said it smelled like he was right next to a wood fire.
The CNN animated graphic shows most of the smoke of current concern coming from northeastern Ontario wildfires, heading SSW then curving around and heading SE in pretty much a direct beeline towards NYC, NJ, and points south.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen the local weather forecast read “smoke”. The general area where I am is currently rated only a moderate risk but is expected to substantially worsen through tomorrow. At the moment it appears just somewhat hazy and there is no smell. Overall this has been the worst series of wildfires that I can remember all over the country.
Here in the Philly suburbs, the sun was orange yesterday morning. It was dusty this morning and got worse by the afternoon school bus runs. Now, it is worse again. The dust here is yellow. The birds are confused in the trees. All in all, this is a fine simulation of a Saudi sandstorm.
Meanwhile here in the Midwest, we had smoke in the atmosphere from the British Columbia fires, which let up just in time for the wind to shift and blow in from the E. Canada fires. Air quality has been pretty steadily in the low to mid 100s for days now. It’s 102 right now, and will go up to about 108 tomorrow. I know that doesn’t sound like much but we haven’t had a blue sky for a couple of weeks, and it’s getting to people with respiratory problems.
Here in central NC, things are better now than they were last night and this morning, because we’ve gotten some rain. My neighbor owns a landscaping/gardening business and she cancelled all her jobs for today so her employees didn’t have to do manual labor outside. I was outside this morning for about 15 minutes to pick blueberries and ended up with a runny nose and gunky throat just in that short time.
Between the incoming clouds and haze, we had a pretty spooky looking sunset last night.
