Air quality across southern Idaho remains in the "very unhealthy" category, according to the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
An air quality advisory, including a complete ban on outdoor burning, is in effect across the Snake River Plain and Central Mountain areas, including Adams, Valley, Custer and Lemhi counties to the north and the Wyoming state line to the east.
Localized air quality readings found online may be different than the official categorization, but DEQ cautions against relying solely on forecasts from some websites because not every site uses the same data or forecasting methods. DEQ says its forecasts are developed and reviewed by Idaho air quality experts. The agency says during periods of degraded air quality, it’s important to take steps to protect yourself by staying indoors, using high quality air filters and wearing N-95 masks when outside.
Troy Oppie spoke with National Weather Service Boise meteorologist Josh Smith about the current smoke forecast and how it works.
Read the full transcript below.
Troy Oppie, BSPR: It's All Things Considered on Boise State Public Radio News. Good afternoon, I'm Troy Oppie. Josh Smith is with the National Weather Service office in Boise, here to talk about smoke and the smoke forecast and the weather forecast.
Josh, I want to get to how the smoke forecast is compiled in just a moment. But the top line is how long are we in for some heavy smoke cover like we've experienced today on Monday?
Josh Smith, NWS Boise: Hi, Troy. Uh, it looks like we're going to be in it for a while based on where the current fires are and the winds aloft.
Oppie: Tell me more about that. And I know there's, there's different, there's, there's total smoke and there's surface smoke; I think what's the difference between those two and, and how do you look at the, the models to kind of interpret what's going to be felt by, by folks on the ground?
Smith: So first we look at where the fires are located. Um, how far away they are from locations nearby. And we then assess, you know, what the distance to travel to get to those locations. So in our case, uh, these fires are very close. They're across the Harney and Malheur County in Oregon, southeast Oregon. And we have some more fires, um, in north central Oregon as well. So they're pretty close to us. And based on the, the pattern that we have right now with west-southwesterly winds, that smoke is going to be pushed over towards Idaho. And given that they're not that far away, they don't have much of a chance to get lifted into the atmosphere. So they remain closer to the surface than, say, if they were further away, like California or Western Oregon.
Oppie: And I know on your social media channels, the National Weather Service Boise publishes these, the Pacific Northwest Smoke Out forecast is what it's called. It's referred to as experimental. Can you help people understand a little bit more about that and what some of the the science and tech is that goes into developing this and, and why it's considered experimental and maybe how accurate it can be at this stage.
Smith: So it's experimental in that the model that we use is a relatively newer one, at least for the purposes for smoke. So we use these tools. The model tries to take the fires that it knows about and and how it gets that is via the satellite, um, that we have orbiting. Um, even Geo satellites can pick up the fires and then it tries to interpolate the fire size, its strength, um, how hot it is and tries to interpolate that over 48, over 48 hours or so to determine where that smoke goes. So it uses um, some recent observations to kind of um input that into the model. It is pretty good. Um the issues that it has is if there's too much smoke, it has a hard time detecting new fires or fires around the area. And it also doesn't know if a fire might be put out or it doesn't know where there's new fires. So if one starts before the model or the satellite gets to see it, um it can't really detect that. So it will we won't have smoke, uh, for that particular fire, but overall it does, it does really well. Um, but it is a new tool that we've had. We've had it for, uh, we've started doing it about ten years ago, but the newer stuff now, the is relatively new, maybe a couple of years.
Oppie: And you mentioned that kind of 48 hour mark. Is that really the, the extent of, of where the prediction, the best accuracy of the prediction lies is that 1 to 2 day mark.
Smith: Yes. And that's generally the length at which we run our higher resolution models, uh, because we don't have the complete computing power to go out even further than that at the moment. But generally that's the best estimates that we can get is that 48 hour mark.
Oppie: Josh Smith is with the National Weather Service, Boise office. Josh, our last 30s here. Before we go, uh, what can we expect from a weather perspective in the next several days?
Smith: Well, I think we're going to continue to see the smoke across the region for the next seven, I think 14 days. We might see a little bit of improvement, maybe Saturday with some wind and a dry trough moving through, but I don't see much improvement in the smoke overall, unfortunately.
Oppie: Josh, thanks for your time this afternoon.
Smith: No problem.
Transcript generated by software, but edited by humans.
