The First Wildfire Smoke of the Season Reaches Washington State and My New Podcast

The Cherrywood Fire of southern Nevada.  DOE image.

My New Podcast

My new podcast is out, providing the latest forecast for this weekend, and in the second part, I describe the history of weather forecasting over the past 200 years.

Here is my podcast, with more streaming information at the bottom of the blog.

Click the play button to listen or use your favorite streaming service (see below)

First Smoke of the Season

I was a bit surprised when I saw the visible satellite imagery this morning:  there was clearly significant wildfire smoke over the eastern portion of Washington State (see image below).  This smoke is aloft and not reaching the surface.


This is confirmed by air quality monitors around the region, which are all green (good air quality).

The Cherrywood fire is now about 15,000 acres in size and is burning in mainly grass, so I suspect it will be short-lived (grass fires generally burn fast and are accessible to fire-fighting).  

You can see the movement of the smoke from the simulation of the NOAA HRRR-Fire system.  Here is the predicted smoke at 11 AM.  You can see the smoke's origin and its movement northward.


And the 6 AM forecast is nearly perfect, with the dense smoke over eastern Washington. 


The smoke should spread out (diffuse) and move westward over time but will remain aloft.

You can stream my podcast from your favorite services:

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