DETROIT (WWJ) – A thick haze blanketed Metro Detroit -- and most of Michigan -- again on Wednesday afternoon, as wildfires rage up in Canada.
Another Air Quality Alert has been issued for Thursday as smoke from the fires leaves the area flirting with “hazardous” numbers.
While numerous events were canceled or postponed across the state on Wednesday, many are wondering just how long we’ll be dealing with poor air quality because of the fires.
Will it be with us all summer?
“It looks like we’ll be dealing with the Canadian fires all summer. It’s something we’re just gonna have to be mindful of through the rest of the summer,” AccuWeather meteorologist Brian Thompson told WWJ’s Tony Ortiz on this week’s Weather Wednesday segment.
But it won’t always be this bad, he said.
“The general flow pattern this time of year will keep that smoke generally off to our north and east based on where the fires are,” Thompson said. “But there will be some times where the flow pattern sets up just right, just like it did the past few days when a storm came through and the flow around the backside brought our flow more out of the north and northeast.”
But on an average day the rest of the summer, Thompson says it won’t be “that big of an issue.”
While parts of the Western U.S. and Canada are more used to dealing with the effects of wildfires, this isn’t something we see much in the Midwest.
“But this particular summer, due to a lot of the dry weather we saw throughout the spring across Ontario and Quebec, we’re seeing those fires closer to us, so when the smoke gets pulled in, it has a bigger impact on us locally,” Thompson said.
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