Tracking the smoke plume; July heat wave ahead?

Smoky Summer of 2015

Each season in Minnesota has a personality. Winter was kind and gentle. Spring was like a long, warm hug. The summer of 2015 may be remembered for smoky skies and vivid sunsets as wildfire smoke plumes of varying intensity drifted overhead.

Surreal skies

Several people told me Minnesota's weird smoky sky made them feel uneasy Monday. We're not alone as the massive smoke plumes get blown around by shifting winds. Residents of Vancouver are feeling the way Minnesotans felt yesterday as the smoke plume descended upon the city. Like Minnesota Monday, recent air quality in Vancouver has rivaled Beijing.

NASA's Earth Observatory describes the situation as smoke shrouded Vancouver.

A difficult fire season in western Canada brought its impacts to coastal city streets in early July 2015. A thick pall of smoke settled over Vancouver and adjacent areas of British Columbia, leading some residents to wear face masks and health officials to warn residents and World Cup tourists against outdoor activities.

Here's more on how Vancouver residents are reacting to the surreal smoke plumes from Canada's National Post.

Kristin Zerbin is reaching for the right words, because things have been getting pretty weird in Vancouver lately, and to articulate the weirdness one must take a deep breath and look out of the window, and look into peoples’ eyes, deeply, because every face in the city of Vancouver seems written over with the same quizzical expression.

It is a look that says: this is so “eerie.” So “spooky.” So “strange,” and so not Vancouver, not in the summer, when the sun is supposed to be shining off the mountains and the air is supposed to taste like salt — not ash. And then there is the smoke, an oppressive grey haze that is scratching at residents throats, and eyes, and making everything, everything — hair, clothes, office buildings, homes, car interiors — smell like a giant campfire.

B.C. is burning, as is much of Western Canada, with 886 (and counting) wildfires ripping across the province, whipping great big plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. Blotting out the sun in Vancouver and inspiring many, Zerbin, a meditation instructor, among them, to ask some deeper life questions.

“Walking downtown to work this morning I just keep thinking what if this all went to flames? What would we do then?” she says. “And I keep thinking about what it was like hundreds of years ago for people, when life was much less certain, and safe. When people were threatened by things that were bigger than them.”

Unprecedented fire season?

The massive amounts of smoke being generated by fires in western North America in 2015 may be unprecedented. Alaska is on a record pace for wildfire activity so far in 2015. Canadian fires are actively burning an area the size of New Jersey, around 8,500 square miles. Over 13,000 people have been evacuated from Saskatchewan in the largest evacuation on record.

These numbers from Canada's National Post are astounding.

4: Number of Prince Edward Islands that could fit inside the parts of Canada currently on fire. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre said Monday 2.2 million hectares of forest were on fire, mostly in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

50: Average interval, in minutes, between the eruption of new fires in B.C. On Saturday and Sunday alone, 57 new wildfires were reported.

1: Percentage of the population of Saskatchewan on the run from wildfires. About 13,000 of the province’s 1.1 million people are sleeping in hastily organized shelters, often with little more than a small suitcase and the clothes on their back.

1,400: Canadian soldiers deployed to fight fires in Saskatchewan. By comparison, the expedition sent to confront the Red River Rebellion in 1870 comprised only about 1,000 troops.

120: Firefighters streaming into Western Canada from across the continent.

800: Evacuees who received free tickets to attend Sunday’s Saskatchewan Roughriders game in Saskatoon. As of Sunday, Saskatoon was sheltering 1,179 evacuees from the province’s fire-ravaged north.

40: People who lost homes in Montreal Lake, Sask., on the weekend. “We lost our battle with Mother Nature,” said Chief Ed Henderson of Montreal Lake Cree Nation.

Tracking the plume

Yes, there is more smoke in our future this summer in Minnesota. As the fires continue to burn upstream, the thickness and position of the smoke plume over Minnesota depends on the wind flow between 10,000 and 20,000 feet.

This smoke plume trajectory forecast model shows another wave of thick smoke heading for Lake Winnipeg, and possibly northern Minnesota in the next 48 hours.

Expect smoke of varying intensity to continue to drift over Minnesota in the coming days and probably weeks.

Weekend hot front

As I wrote this morning, the weekend still looks hot and increasingly humid. The latest model runs support my notion of 90s this weekend as a southerly wind flow builds in the northern Plains behind departing high pressure later this week.

The longer range trends suggest as many as five days at or above 90 degrees in the next two weeks.

Stay tuned...a summer heat wave may be brewing for the last half of July.