The Skies Over Seattle Are Clear. For Now.

In the past two summers, Seattle's skies have been socked with wildfire smoke from every direction.

JUNE 17, 2019: The sky over downtown Seattle is a tad overcast, but the air is still clean. For now. Wildfire season on the west coast hasn't gotten off the ground just yet. When it does, in the next several weeks, our air quality will become worse than in any number of third-world countries. It's been this way during the past two summers. Get your inhalers and surgical masks ready.

When wildfire season takes off, we get the wildfire smoke migrating south from British Columbia, west from Idaho and eastern Washington, and north from California and Oregon. Two summers ago, we were getting it from north and south simultaneously. I personally know a child who was born during the height of a very-unhealthy air quality episode that summer. He began having serious breathing issues literally the moment he came into the world, and he had to spend the first two or three days of his life in the neonatal ICU. He's okay now; but it's no thanks to whoever started the B.C. and California wildfires.

Seattle has always had a reputation for rainy weather; but that hasn't applied in summer for quite some while. During most summers, for the past fifteen years at least, we have gotten almost no rain whatsoever. Every blade of grass not in the shade burns to a crisp; folks are prohibited from burning trash or charcoal in open pits; and city buses cannot be washed, for fear that water reservoirs will run too low. Apparently conditions are more or less the same up and down the west coast; and any little spark from a carelessly-flung cigarette butt is the key ingredient for a disaster. I don't know how Seattle got selected as the convergence spot for wildfire smoke blowing in from hundreds of miles away; but for weeks at a time in midsummer, our air has the unmistakable odor of burning wood, and our elected officials keep going on camera telling everyone to stay indoors if we don't absolutely need to go somewhere. During the worst phase of the wildfire haze, you cannot see West Seattle and Alki Beach from across Elliott Bay. Meteorologists have had their dramatic moments telling us that our air quality has gotten worse than that of Mexico City and Calcutta, India.

I'm not sure exactly how this relates to climate change; but we weren't getting smothered in haze from wildfire smoke like this prior to 2017. We've always had wildfire season on the west coast during the summer and early fall (including here in western Washington), with varying degrees of severity; but something changed just a couple of years ago. Wildfires have become more frequent and much larger, with more of them breaking out at the same time. Meanwhile, back east, flooding episodes are increasing in number and intensity. Down through the heartland, tornados are becoming more frequent, and increasingly stronger, with tornado season stretching into early winter. Hurricanes are setting and breaking records for size and severity around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, while typhoons seem to be supersizing in the western Pacific Ocean, with catastrophic and tragic results, as a simple matter of course. Anyone noticing a pattern here?

Take care, and I hope your air quality is okay...

Here is a link to a daily-updated map of current wildfires across North America.