NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — A U.S. government model shows that smoke from dozens of western wildfires is starting to billow across the country.
It's becoming an unfortunate new feature of New York City's summer weather — wildfire smoke from the West Coast moving east and adding to the haze here.
"I was just looking at the satellite picture through the morning hours and I could see there's like a very thin, milky, white-ish haze over the area and that is indeed from those wildfires out west carried by the jet stream all the way to the East Coast," WCBS 880 Chief Meteorologist Craig Allen said Friday morning. "Not as prolific as what happened last year, not yet anyway. It's an unfortunate situation to begin with, but yeah, that's what we're seeing."
More than 60 wildfires are currently burning across 12 western states, causing smoke to blanket much of the U.S. and Canada, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA says, "The fires are injecting smoke 40,000 feet into the atmosphere and compromising air quality," particularly in Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington.
In parts of southern California the danger of even more fires is rated as "extreme."
The largest fire currently burning on the West Coast is known as the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, which has burned 212,377 acres since flames erupted on July 6.
More than 34,000 fires have burned more than 2 million acres to date this year — the most fires between January and July since 2011, NOAA says.
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