The national Preparedness Level has increased to level 4 because of significant wildfire activity in much of the western U.S.
There’s currently a low risk for wildfires in the Northwoods thanks to a rainy June. But as we’ve experienced from recent summers, western and Canadian wildfires can have a direct impact on this region’s air quality.
Dozens of wildfires burning hundreds of thousands of acres are currently burning out west in both the U.S. and Canada.
The last few summers brought smoke from fires just like them to the Northwoods, dropping air quality to some of the worst levels seen in the region in years.
Other than muting our normally brilliant, clear skies, the smoke particles can cause serious health issues, especially for those with underlying health conditions.
Because of the potential risk to human health, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources will put out alerts and advisories when air quality is expected to drop to the Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups level or lower.
There are a multitude of factors that go into forecasting where wildfire smoke will go and how it will impact a region.
Figuring all that out is part of Jay Charney’s job. He’s a research meteorologist for the USDA Forest Service Northern Research station based in Lansing, Michigan.
“You need a fire. You need to have fuels. The fuels are consumed, and then they loft smoke and other constituents of the consumption burning process into the atmosphere. Once those materials are lofted into the atmosphere, that's when meteorological conditions and a meteorologist forecaster takes over with trying to understand where the smoke is going to go next,” said Charney.
A large focus of Charney’s research is how can we get more accurate smoke forecasting.
He says right now, there are a lot of tools in place that can look at the big picture: how much smoke is being pushed into the atmosphere, what direction it’s headed, will it drop the air quality in a region.
But there’s a lack of information in the details like what time of day is the air quality going to be the worst or what will the difference in air quality be between two towns 50 miles apart.
Charney says a lot of the uncertainty goes back to how the smoke is put into the model.
“Because HRRR [High Resolution Rapid Refresh] smoke, this particular weather forecast tool, doesn't know a lot about what's actually going on on the fire. It can detect them from satellites or from other reports and put fire in there. But then there's kind of an assumption that says, ‘Okay, based on the size of this fire, this is how much smoke I'm putting in there.’ and then the smoke starts to move. Well, that assumption is a little, there's a lot of details in there that that assumption is not necessarily capturing,” said Charney.
As Charney and his collaborators study fires and smoke he hopes meteorologists will be able to make more accurate and detailed smoke forecasts with the ultimate goal of people being able to better plan their activities around smoke and keep themselves safe.
“My research is working towards trying to make those better. Working through the whole system, starting from the fire, what's the fire doing, and then how much smoke has been produced, over what time is it being produced, is it more intense in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening so that we have a change in the amount of smoke that's been put in the air over time. That will make it more accurate to know what happens to that smoke when it's transported downwind,” said Charney.
More accurate forecasting could also lead to more prescribed fires and eventually less smoke impact.
Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems and often improve wildlife habitats.
Prescribed fires can also make communities safer by reducing fuels and therefore the intensity and amount of smoke a wildfire churns out.
Charney says if we can choose when to put smoke in the air to ensure it’s going places that are less impactful to humans, then there’s a net benefit to communities.
“There really is a push to increase the amount of prescribed fire by quite a lot compared to what we've done in the past,” said Charney. “So trying to better understand all of this so that when we put prescribed fire on the ground, we can control the impacts is really important.”
Even as smoke forecasting gets more accurate, Charney says a large limitation is not knowing when or where a large wildfire will pop up.
“We can go from no fire on the ground, have three or four days of hot, dry, windy conditions, and suddenly, there's fire everywhere and something insanely big. That can be a whole bunch of little fires, but those can lead to very sudden smoke impacts that three days ago, we had no idea because there was no fire,” said Charney. “That's one situation in which you can't necessarily have a lot of warning.”
Another challenge is getting those air quality alerts out.
Right now, there’s no unified way of getting the message out in the U.S. Who pushes out alerts varies from state to state or even region to region.
“That's another thing that really was highlighted last year is that there were moderate to severe communication issues about what information is most reliable and where are people getting their information,” said Charney.
Charney says a lot of western states have better pathways for that kind of information because of how common smoke impacts are there.
But the need for more accurate and better communicated smoke forecasts will likely continue to grow as our climate warms leading to more frequent and more intense wildfires and likely more smoky days in the Northwoods.
