1 year ago
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Much of the Northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States has been blanketed in smoke from Canadian wildfires this week, leading to historically bad air quality in major cities like New York and Philadelphia. Canada is on track to have a record year for wildfires, with more than 400 fires—240 of them “out of control”—burning Wednesday, and airflow patterns are funneling the smoke southward.
People in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and areas between were pulling out their N95 masks to cope with the smoke, as people on the West Coast were sharing advice about how to respond by staying indoors with windows closed, upgrading filtration on HVAC systems if possible, and getting air purifiers or building Corsi-Rosenthal boxes. These are responses people on the West Coast know too well, and this week people on the East Coast are learning that, due to climate change, it might be relevant in their region going forward, too.
“While these events have been really rare historically, I think all evidence suggests they’ll become less rare in the future as the climate warms,” Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University, told The Washington Post. “So this is something we need to learn to prepare for.”
