SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – With Canadian wildfires creating an orange hazy sky over much of the East Coast on Wednesday, resulting in some of the worst air quality around the world, some are wondering if the hazy orange skies are the new normal.
KCBS Radio’s Pat Thurston and Bret Burkhart spoke with Malcolm North, a forest ecologist with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station and an adjunct professor at UC Davis, about the impacts of the fires and why they result in the now increasingly common haze.
North shared that seeing wildfires in Canada this early in the year is out of the ordinary, but when it comes to why they’re popping up, it’s clear.
“The biggest thing is that Canada has had a really extreme drought and very high temperatures. Normally they get large wildfires, but they tend to be later in the summer,” he said.
With the wildfires having raged on throughout the week, areas south of Quebec, Alberta, and Manitoba, where fires have been blazing, have been left with a hazy orange sky, like what was seen in San Francisco in 2020.
North shares that even though it may seem like the end of the world — or some post-apocalyptic show on AMC — it’s a normal occurrence when the sun is out and smoke is in the sky.
“The smoke is refracting the sunlight,” North said. “Particularly what it tends to do, because of the wavelengths going through the smoke, is it produces more of an orangey color. As an old forest firefighter, I can say you always feel like you’re in the end of the world when you see conditions like that, but it’s pretty common in just about any wildfire situation to have that kind of a coloration in the sky.”
While sometimes science can be convoluted and confusing, North says that isn’t the case here, as the worse it looks outside, the worse it actually is.
“The smoke concentrations can get very high. Particularly, the more orangey color you got, the thicker the smoke, the more dangerous the breathing conditions are in general,” North said.
To hear more about what’s driving wildfires and making them more common, as North says this is a sign of the future to come, listen to his full interview here:
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