You may have noticed hazy skies above the Tantramar area in the past two days or so.
The website Firesmoke.ca predicts the path of smoke from wildfires, and shows smoke travelling across the Maritimes recently.
Jill Maepea is a meteorologist with Environment Canada. CHMA’s Erica Butler called her up Wednesday afternoon to ask if the smoke coming from western fires is something that people on the ground here might need to worry about.
JILL MAEPEA:
I would go with no. We currently have actually quite a bit of smoke in our skies right now. If you look up right now… well, if you have sunshine I suppose. And this happened yesterday as well, you are seeing a very hazy sky, probably seeing orange, a little bit orangeish hues to the sun, especially at sunset and at sunrise.But all that smoke is really expected to remain aloft, not expected to reach the surface in the Maritimes. We do have a frontal system expected to move in on Thursday. This will likely probably clear some of our air for a brief period as well, as our winds will shift around to the west and northwest.
So right now we are still expecting a hazy sky, but we aren’t expecting our air quality to be reduced at the surface at this point.
EB: Okay, so we can see it, but it’s not down low enough to really affect the sort of everyday activities.
JM: Yes, exactly.
EB: This is, I guess, a typical thing that we’ve seen in the past where wildfires from quite a distance will affect or will be visible here in the Maritimes.
JM: Yeah, definitely. We’ve seen in past years, with the fires, they can just get the smoke just gets transported. But again, it’s transported thousands of feet above the surface at this point. So our atmosphere is quite deep, actually. But yeah, we’ve seen it in past years. So it’s nothing entirely out of the ordinary. It just happens to be on the year, if there is a lot of smoke and it does happen to have a pattern that will carry it across the country.
