Smoke Continues To Sting Vermont, And Many Other Areas As Heat Wave (Eventually) Looms

Visible satellite photo from Monday afternoon showed
most of the wildfire smoke sandwiched between a weak
cold front in southern Quebec and another weak
front in Pennsylvania. That milkiness in the image
between those two cloud bands is smoke. 

 The wildfire smoke goes on and on here in Vermont and in much of the United States and southern Canada, and we're still choking this morning. 

The air quality alert persists in the Green Mountain State through midnight tonight. Other areas around the Great Lakes, the Northeast, parts of Texas, and of course Canada also remain under these alerts. 

Writing in Facebook, WCAX-TV meteorologist Gunnar Consul said the air quality index in Burlington was reported as low as 141 Monday, the second worst this year and the fifth worst on record since 2000. 

Spending four hours outdoors Monday in Vermont was the equivalent of smoking half a cigarette, Consul wrote.  

The smoke is still around today, and will be for awhile yet. 

A weak cold front has temporarily improved the air quality right along the Canadian border early this morning, where the air quality was regarded as "moderate."  And I mean right along and north of the border. Outside my St. Albans house, 15 or so miles south of the border, it was still awfully hazy out as I wrote this around 7 a.m. today. 

Elsewhere in and near Vermont, it was still "unhealthy for sensitive groups."

VERMONT FORECAST

The air will stay bad region wide today and tomorrow. For now, there' s no new smoke blowing in from Canada. But the air that's over us isn't going anywhere. The air will very slowly improve over the next two or three days only because all those tiny smoke particles that are getting in our lungs are slowly falling out of the sky.  There is no wind to push the smoky air away. 

We're in kind of a  holding pattern while strong high pressure pretty much stalls over Quebec and New England through Thursday. 

Aside from the smoke, this weirdly strong for August high pressure system has kept temperatures around here  pretty comfortable. Readings for the past few days have been close to normal for this time of year and will pretty much remain that way through Thursday. 

Reasonable humidity has also allowed nights to cool off comfortably. It was in the 50s to near 60 at dawn again today. Expect the same tomorrow morning and maybe Thursday morning, too.  Today might actually be a couple degrees cooler than the low 80s we saw Monday. 

That very weak cold front that staggered unnoticed into Vermont yesterday is still around and fading. Its remnants and a bit of atmospheric moisture that found its way in from the Atlantic Ocean means there should be a few widely scattered showers and garden variety thunderstorms every afternoon today through Thursday.

We could all use the rain, but the vast majority of us will get nothing. A very few lucky devils, especially near the Green Mountains of Vermont, White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Adirondacks could get a brief downpour. A few more of us could see sprinkles from dying showers moving off the mountains. 

Overall, though, the rather high forest fire danger will continue on.

LATE WEEK/WEEKEND

That strong high pressure that's hanging around us will move offshore by the end of the week. That opens the door to a blast of hot air that will come in from the southwest. Temperatures could flirt with 90 degrees Friday in the warmest valleys. 

Ninety degree temperatures look even more widespread Saturday, Sunday and probably Monday. If anything, that high pressure will strengthen further, which would mostly shut off any chances of scattered showers and storms, despite slowly increasing humidity. 

The next chance of rain at all looks to be next Tuesday.  The forecast could change, but I'm not impressed by what's coming Tuesday, so I don't expect a lot of rain. I'm also doubting that thing on Tuesday will cool us off all that much.