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Wildfire Smoke in Northeastern US Visible on GOES East Images

• IAmGraydon 3y ago
  It’s hazy here in Virginia as well, but nothing like NY. Every few years, the Great Dismal Swamp catches on fire (a bit south of here) and the peat moss smoldering creates the most acrid, thick smoke in the area.
• AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Of course it's not the biggest loss here but it's striking that there's talk of canceling the a Canadian Formula 1 Grands Prix in Montreal due to the fires. This would be the second race since the beginning of the season canceled due to climate emergencies.
• gdubs 3y ago
  I own forest land in the PNW, and my wife and I have placed around 15 acres of oak woodland into conservation over the past 5 years, which involved a lot of restoration work which was funded both by ourselves and with grant money through NRCS. One of the reasons we decided to buy land in the first place was because of Climate Change, and a desire to get hands on in doing something – even if at a small scale. We've learned a lot in the process – there's no substitute for 'doing'. I'm chiming in because I feel like this experience has given me a fairly deep perspective on the matter. Fire prevention is on the minds of everyone. Even the most conservative farmers I know are in their own way environmentalists. That's the interesting thing about getting out into the country and off the internet is that you meet a lot of people, and you find common interests – even if you disagree on a lot of stuff. The issue is, this stuff is expensive. You can mow, do manual limbing of trees to prevent 'ladder fires', you can get goats, you can try converting over to ecosystems that are more fire resilient, create smarter development plans and keep structures 100' away from dry woodland, etc. But all of that costs time and money. There are grants, yes, but even that isn't available to everyone, and even that takes time. Because the Climate is become more chaotic, you end up with intense rain fall in the cooler months, leading to explosive growth of brush that is dry fuel/tinder by the end of the long hot summers. And because of the way communities are being planned and developed – closer and deeper into the wild/urban interface – fires become more 'destructive' in terms of property and loss of life. Climate change is a systemic problem. There's no one thing you can point to and say, change this and it will fix the problem. Except maybe drastically reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Lastly, I'm a huge fan of controlled burns. But they're not without risk, and the liability of conducting them is largely than the people seem to realize. We had an agricultural burn set of a tree 30' away during a rainstorm, in the deepest part of burn season, during extremely high humidity. Why? Because the summer had been freakishly hot. According to the fire department, it was a happening a lot. It's getting harder and harder to safely use fire as a preventative measure in a lot of areas. Anyway, just some perspective from someone who's actually been living this.
  • Beefin 3y ago
    controlled burns are fascinating, especially considering how rooted (hehe) in indigenous culture they are. do you have any formulas for deciding when and how to do so?
    • gdubs 3y ago
      There's designated months of the year when burns are allowed, but something like a forestry controlled burn is the kind of thing that would be done in collaboration with local forest service / fire departments / etc. Smaller burns are more at the discretion of the landowner, and things like agricultural burns are pretty common during the wet months in the Pacific Northwest. People build piles, let them dry out, and wait until a designated burn day. We haven't done anything on the scale of letting a whole field or forest floor burn deliberately – far too much liability and overhead. If you could get it to a state where it could be done regularly, I think it'd be ideal. But, as things are now, there's just too much that can go wrong, and so that's a big part of the situation we're all in now.
• nicetryguy 3y ago
  I am in eastern PA; the smoky haze smells awful and the orange tinged sky looks like dusk in the mid afternoon. It's pretty serious.
  • Cyphase 3y ago
    I remember when we had that in the SF area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Skies_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Skies_Day
    • nicetryguy 3y ago
      Wow! It's not quite that orange here, but i figure this would be a fairly common occurrence in CA.
      • paranoidxprod 3y ago
        I'm on Long Island and it feels like it's getting closer and closer to that.
• bluefishinit 3y ago
  I was just on a call with someone in NY and they had to end the call early because their eyes were burning and they were having trouble breathing. It looked really bad.
  • jrockway 3y ago
    It's an odd shade of yellow outside and it smells like you are inside a wood smoker. I have my air filters running almost full blast and it only helps a little bit; still way above "normal". I'm coughing a little bit as well. Overall, less than ideal! I will not be going for a walk this evening.
  • KoftaBob 3y ago
    Were they taking the call outside?
    • lbotos 3y ago
      I'm in my apt in NYC right now with windows closed and you can smell/feel it still. It's surprisingly intense.
    • bluefishinit 3y ago
      Inside.
  • tzs 3y ago
    I was curious and just checked the NYC AQI. It's 324 right now, which is classified as "hazardous". Wow. That would definitely suck. Here on the other side of the country, in the Puget Sound area, we get some bad days of wildfire smoke every year, but I don't think I've ever seen it that high. The highest I recall is around 250. A good HEPA filter can really help. I use an older version of this [1]. It can generally keep my living room AQI below 10ish. I read that the Whirlpool brand name was sold off to some generic oversees appliance maker several years ago, so I don't know if that one on Amazon is as effective as my 20+ year old one. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-Whispure-Purifier-Cleaner-AP51030K/dp/B00440EKRG https://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-Whispure-Purifier-Cleaner-A...
• jnsie 3y ago
  In NYC and was just outside. Large percentage of people wearing masks. Smells like a fire pit. Looks like blade runner. Interesting times.
  • kulikalov 3y ago
    Is it unusual? My first year here
    • kadoban 3y ago
      Yes, quite unusual.
    • roywiggins 3y ago
      It's pretty much unprecedented.
      • tjohns 3y ago
        Unprecedented for the east coast. It's a reality we've been living with on the west coast for the last few years already.
        • EMCymatics 3y ago
          This is the thickest, longest lasting, and furthest traveling wild fire smoke I've ever experienced. I Left the windows open to sleep and I woke up with a voice two octaves lower.
          • whimsicalism 3y ago
            Was worse in SF a few years ago
            • kaesar14 3y ago
              To my research, SF AQI has never topped 249. New York just topped out at 342 today with no sign of letting up. I won't dispute that SF wildfire season being so frequent and long lasting, there's been nasty periods, but no it's factually incorrect that SF has ever been at one time worse than what's happening in NYC right now.
• baggy_trough 3y ago
  That's not exactly a surprise, is it? The GOES images from California and elsewhere on the west coast have been apocalyptic in recent years.
  • alexose 3y ago
    It's hard to watch a whole new cohort of people have to confront this for the first time. It brings back a lot of the feelings I had back in 2020...
• Eumenes 3y ago
  How come all these fires started at the same time, on the same day across Quebec? https://is2.4chan.org/pol/1686160767790674.webm https://is2.4chan.org/pol/1686160767790674.webm
  • pvaldes 3y ago
    > How come all these fires started at the same time Waves of wildfires starting in the same day can happen by natural causes like a dry storm, but are also a typical signature in wildfires linked to criminal activity. Example: 121 provoked wildfires in the same night and council in North Spain March 2023, a few days after the police stopped a narco operation. There are some suspicious trends, there is a wave of fires aiming to overpower the firefigthers capability to react. Often at night or weekends. The first spots burnt are often delimited by administrative frontiers, the string of fires follow a road, and fires extinguished reactivate often in the next nights. The fire starts first on internet. Wildfires are also typically coupled with cyberwarfare mocking environmentalism and scientific facts on social webs and journals. The criminal thinks that is a hero or adopts a role of victim. There is a lot of self-justifying and blame deflection towards other targetted groups. At least in Southern Europe this is a reaally common pattern. Your mileage may vary.
  • baggy_trough 3y ago
    presumably lightning.
    • alexose 3y ago
      Yep, almost certainly this. The same thing has been happening every year out west. It sometimes takes a day or more for lightning-caused fires to grow to a size that they can be detected via satellite.
    • tricksforfree 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • baggy_trough 3y ago
• bombcar 3y ago
  https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors/ https://www.sevarg.net/2021/08/28/temtop-air-quality-sensors... has some details on air quality sensors and at the bottom, some homemade air filters you can make; they work well.
• alexose 3y ago
  I'm asking this honestly and in good faith: When do we start demanding SO2 injection? How much more of this are we going to try to brush off before we decide it's unacceptable?
  • 0_____0 3y ago
    What makes you think geoengineering is going to solve more problems than it introduces?
    • alexose 3y ago
      1) It's been known since at least 2018 that the sudden reduction in SO2 pollutants has been contributing to a spike in surface warming https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/esd-2018-83/esd-2018-83.pdf https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/esd-2018-83/esd-2018-83... 2) While imperfect, there is some historical record of how this process plays out via volcanic eruptions 3) SAI is never going to perfectly solve all problems associated with carbon pollution. But it doesn't need to be perfect-- just better than the alternative.
      • 0_____0 3y ago
        I don't really doubt the technical side, but what do you think will happen when a country proposes SO2 injection? It's a global solution to a set of localized issues that not all countries face, there will certainly be objection from countries who think their atmosphere, climate, agriculture will be negatively affected. You can point to North American forests and say "look! we must solve this!" and other nations would rightly point out that poor forestry practices contributed to the issue, and that historically much of that forest land would have burned with regularity without humanity's help. I don't see how you could form consensus behind this approach. The alternative is world war.
        • alexose 3y ago
          I'm not sure I subscribe to this argument given that countries are already polluting massive amounts of CO2 (and SO2, until about five years ago), and nobody seems to be going to war over it. There are massive issues of equity wrapped up in maintaining the status quo as well as trying something different. I would also point out that megafires are not the only symptom. Drought, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and sea level rise are all driven by a warming planet. Surely there is a break even point where it's worth taking on additional risk in order to mitigate some of these problems. Getting back to my original question: Where is that break-even? Maybe there simply isn't one, and we'd rather collectively go down with the ship.
• kylecazar 3y ago
  It's pretty wild here in CT. Thick, acrid air. I suppose Californians have been dealing with this for a while, but I haven't experienced it in my life up here.
  • mostlysimilar 3y ago
    Not just California, the entire west coast. Seattle's season breakdown has "smoke" slotted neatly between two chunks of "summer", typically lasting from late June/early July to late August/early September.
    • COGlory 3y ago
      And the northern Rockies, including parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan. While there are occasionally local fires, they are never as bad as the smoke from California.
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        BC can get pretty bad, especially east of the mountains but even sometimes in the west side. Didn’t Alberta have that one big town burn down a few years ago?
    • zamalek 3y ago
      > Seattle's season breakdown has "smoke" slotted neatly We called the season "Smogust" when we lived there.
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Was there smoke last year (2022)? I don’t recall any. I remember 2020 being bad, and a few days in 2021, but nothing in 2022.
      • Analemma_ 3y ago
        There was, but it was "many weeks of sporadic AQI 80" as opposed to "a week or two of continuous AQI 200" like 2020 was.
• vinaypai 3y ago
  I'm in NYC. The sky was a deep orange in the afternoon and you could easily look directly at the midday sun without discomfort. There is a visible haze indoors looking down a long hallway. It's cleared up a bit now but still quite bad.
• akiselev 3y ago
  You can also see the haze on Zoom Earth [1] with a hourly timelapse. There seems to be an especially large cloud of it hovering off of the East Coast of the US and Canada [1] https://zoom.earth/ https://zoom.earth/
  • Karawebnetwork 3y ago
    You can also easily track the smoke using this website: https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
  • hn8305823 3y ago
    With this wider perspective you can see the very wide range of fires producing smoke. A lot is getting funneled to the Northeast US but it looks like some of it is even getting funneled into the midwest on the other side of the weather system.
• mig39 3y ago
  Is this the wildfire smoke from Northern Canada? Here's the view from Fort McMurray, Alberta -- a drone video I took last week. Check out the swarm of birds at 2:30 or so in the video. Fort McMurray had Canada's largest wildfire in 2016, and we don't have much more left to burn, but nearby smoke makes this place surreal. https://youtu.be/GevKM4L8Nl8 https://youtu.be/GevKM4L8Nl8 Also, this is such a regular occurrence these days that we have websites that predict the smoke, like https://firesmoke.ca https://firesmoke.ca
  • ipkpjersi 3y ago
    Other provinces are having wildfires too like Quebec and Ontario IIRC.
    • mig39 3y ago
      Yeah, a big one in Nova Scotia recently too.
      • weird-fact-guy 3y ago
        The largest fire in the history of the province (since colonization) is still actively burning in Nova Scotia, despite six consecutive days of rain. June 1st was also the 26th hottest day since 1871.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    Yes. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236229>
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    This particular nastiness is actually coming from Northern Quebec, mostly. That's some "yummy" drone footage. I remember one summer in the mid 90s when it got like that in Edmonton for a bit. Good times.
• 0_____0 3y ago
  Related: a historical instance of fire smoke so dense it darkened the skies (1780) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England%27s_Dark_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England%27s_Dark_Day
• duxup 3y ago
  When it dipped down into Minnesota, I went out for a walk. The smoke was so thick. I could’ve swore there had to have been a house fire, a block or two away. On some streets, I couldn’t see the end of the street it was so smoky.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Here on Long Island, everything is sepiatone, and it smells like a smokehouse. But I also know that folks in California and Australia have been dealing with exactly this, for a long time. It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US. I was watching AppleTV+ Extrapolations[0], which is actually damn depressing. The first episode has wildfires everywhere, and air quality around the globe sucks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series)
  • oezi 3y ago
    It is damn depressing because solving the climate crisis costs so little: It is estimated to cost between 2-6% of global GDP each year until 2050 to prevent exceeding 1.5 C mostly by building out renewables. I could imagine that many people will start investing in air quality filtering solutions for their private home on a scale that matches what we should be spending on climate efforts per person per year.
    • dmix 3y ago
      2-6% global GDP probably means 20% of all western country’s GDP paying for the rest of the world while China paints their rocks green to fool their own gov inspectors. https://youtu.be/AynNsPs9i80 https://youtu.be/AynNsPs9i80
      • oezi 3y ago
        Nonsense. The western world needs to solve their own emissions first and foremost. China is reducing its import of fossils by building renewables on a massive scale.
        • dgfitz 3y ago
          GP provided a link, you’ve just made empty claims. Fighting climate change is a losing battle until China and India change their ways. To deny this is quite foolish.
• EMCymatics 3y ago
  The sun has been giving me sunset colors when it is not even close to the horizon
• ridgeguy 3y ago
  Experienced this in CA, so bad we really couldn't spend more than a few minutes outdoors. A good room air purifier and closed windows was a big help.
• lostmsu 3y ago
  Which images should we check out?
  • Jtsummers 3y ago
    Check out the GeoColor images. The area over PA and neighbors has a smoky haze, just south and southwest of the New England cloud cover. https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/SECTOR/ne/GEOCOLOR/20231582006_GOES16-ABI-ne-GEOCOLOR-2400x2400.jpg https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/SECTOR/ne/GEOCOL...
• COGlory 3y ago
  To anyone who is experiencing this for the first time, some tips I've found useful: 1) Even if it seems counterintuitive, try not to move air. Don't run fans or open windows. Do run filtration systems, but preferably interior ones. Even exhausting outside will draw new air (and particles) inside. Keep doors and windows closed as much as possible. 2) Run humidifiers if you have them. If you don't, and you just desperately need relief, close the bathroom door and run the shower hot for 10-15 minutes (i.e. make a steam room). That usually helps my sinuses and eyes quite a bit. You can also try breathing through a warm damp rag, although that gets pretty old pretty quickly. 3) No science behind it that I'm aware of, but I find that carrot juice really helps my throat when it's sore. 4) Be sure to try and enjoy at least one sunset. They will be glorious.
  • 2devnull 3y ago
    Carrot juice is a good idea. Antioxidants help. I’ve found NAC and vitamin c help. After a few days an anti-inflammatory will help. And don’t exercise at all. If you’re head hurts and your heart starts racing just lay in bed and wait it out.
  • coffeebeqn 3y ago
    You can get woodworking Masks for outside if it gets bad. Humidity is a tricky one - because we sealed our house for over a week last year it actually got way too humid.
    • dkqmduems 3y ago
      You can still seal your house and control humidity... humidifier dehumidifier pid.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Some people may even still have a collection of N95 masks to wear from the last calmity.
      • seadan83 3y ago
        Be careful, for smoke you want a N99. A N95 will help, but don't be fooled that it is adequate protection.
• ortusdux 3y ago
  I've been looking at picking up an outdoor air quality monitor from PurpleAir. Can anyone vouch for them? I've found their air quality map the most helpful: https://map.purpleair.com/1/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0#5.16/41.047/-78.613 https://map.purpleair.com/1/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0#5.16/41.047...
  • eunoia 3y ago
    I can vouch. Have one at home and use their map as my go to for understanding air quality. I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but they have an API for the Home Assistant types out there.
  • S201 3y ago
    I don't have one personally but I did some research into their hardware when making a DIY clone a few years ago: https://github.com/shanet/clearair https://github.com/shanet/clearair The EPA published a paper calibrating the sensors PurpleAir uses with their much more expensive sensors and found it was fairly close after applying a correction factor (which I also used in my implementation). https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAir%20PM2.5%20Correction%20and%20Performance%20During%20Smoke%20Events.pdf https://github.com/shanet/ClearAir/blob/master/docs/PurpleAi...
    • iak8god 3y ago
      Very cool project. Do you run your clone device in any kind of enclosure?
      • S201 3y ago
        Yes, I keep mine indoors so I made a small wooden box with a cutout on top covered with a piece of window screen material to allow for airflow inside. I figured I'd leave the enclosure as an exercise for the reader since you'd likely have a different preference for it than I did.
    • Eisenstein 3y ago
      Question about your project: can I swap out the Feather M0 for an ESP32 based board like HUZZAH32? * https://www.adafruit.com/product/3405 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3405
• olivermarks 3y ago
  We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the position we are in now. Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper): https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031 https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031 California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact. Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-affirms-indigenous-right-to-controlled-burns https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-... There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.
  • _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
    That sounds like wishful thinking that there is an easy solution for this. Controlled burns can help, but the real issue is that global warming makes areas dryer and the vegetation there is not adapted for the dryer/warmer conditions. We have to tackle more seriously the elephant in the room.
  • gerbilly 3y ago
    Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest? I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity: 1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that? 2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires) 3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires. It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)
• dboreham 3y ago
  Every single year we have severe wikdfire smoke in Montana (and much of the mountain west) from August to September and sometimes into October. Never mentioned in national media. But when the same thing happens in NYC we have screaming headlines about how terrible the air quality is.
  • KidComputer 3y ago
    Probably because the entire population of Montana makes up just one neighborhood of NYC
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      I thought you were joking and then I got curious. Montana has a million people and NYC has almost 9 million people. There are 4 NYC neighborhoods with over 200,000 people [1]. So we can say Montana makes up five NYC neighborhoods (out of 55 neighborhoods total). Close enough! [1] https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendix/neighborhoodpop.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendi...
  • jes 3y ago
    Yep, fully agree. I live in Washington State, and I refer to that time of year as "headache season."
  • DoughnutHole 3y ago
    Maybe it’s because this being unheard of in NYC is literally what makes it happening newsworthy? California has wildfires literally every year but they still make the news when they’re particularly damaging and record breaking. Fires have never impacted NYC to this extent in living memory - it’s deeply unusual for the region and inherently newsworthy.
    • rconti 3y ago
      California wildfires being common is a pretty new thing.
  • 3y ago
• anotheraccount9 3y ago
  I thought most of that smoke was coming from Canada, am I correct?
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    Yes. This is the Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser showing fire activity and PM2.5 particulates (smoke) about 24 hours ago, showing the plume approaching NYC from the north. <https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/06/06/1700Z/particulates/surface/level/annot=fires/overlay=pm2.5/orthographic=-89.55,38.79,1003 https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/06/06/1700Z/particulates/...>
• mynameishere 3y ago
  I think the WTC webcam is pretty neat: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/worldtradecenter/?cam=skyline_g https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/worldtradecenter/?cam=s... It looks like a rust-only paint swathes.
• as4296 3y ago
  [flagged]
• orangepurple 3y ago
  Ground sensor air quality map of the burn area https://waqi.info/#/c/40.887/-77.448/7z https://waqi.info/#/c/40.887/-77.448/7z
  • hanniabu 3y ago
    https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
• orangepurple 3y ago
  I would like someone to explain to a dummy like me how Canada has better air quality than the NYC metropolitan area as measured by numerous ground stations considering that the wildfires are supposed to originate in Canada. Why aren't we seeing hazardous air quality at the US-Canadian border? NYC is hit way harder than upstate NY.
  • Beefin 3y ago
    jet streams: https://esteininger.medium.com/the-broken-jet-stream-behind-nycs-smoke-invasion-7a0b01340128 https://esteininger.medium.com/the-broken-jet-stream-behind-...
  • alephxyz 3y ago
    Cold front pushed the smoke southwest over lake Ontario yesterday and towards NYC/NJ today. Also it's been raining in eastern Canada today.
  • tyjen 3y ago
    I imagine the jet stream is pushing it all south.
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Just the wind patterns. And where the bulk of the fires are. They're mostly in Northern Quebec, so fairly far east, and the smoke seems to be pushing south from there down over Ottawa and then the eastern half of New York and kind of pooling further south. Just got home to southern Ontario from a work trip (in South Dakota, where there was no smoke at all) and I was expecting it to be pretty bad, but it really isn't (though I won't be exerting myself outside or anything). It's sitting mostly east of here, so far. Rain coming next week, that should relieve things.
• xwowsersx 3y ago
  I'm in CT. I did not mask much during COVID, but I am masking now. It is absolutely awful outdoors. Visible smoke and a smell. AQI is currently a very unhealthy 250.
  • gnulinux 3y ago
    Huh... Am in Boston, the air looks and feels... normal.
    • xwowsersx 3y ago
      Makes sense. I'm significantly west of Boston (all the way west in CT) and the smoke stream seems to be coming straight down and then moving easterly, just missing Boston to the south. https://ibb.co/Y80z0jf https://ibb.co/Y80z0jf On Google maps you can click on map details and choose to view air quality overlaid.
• lxe 3y ago
  Fun and related project. The GOES satellites broadcast a signal at around 1.6GHZ that you can pick up and decode, giving you live images (albeit slightly less resolution than the pro-level GRB broadcast), without using the Internet! It's a great beginner hobby project requiring ~100-200 dollars of hardware. There's also a large community of enthusiasts and it also opens up a gateway into RF hobby, other RTL-SDR things, ham radio, and other fun engineering time sinks that really helped pass the time during the Pandemic years. I wrote a small writeup on how to get started a while ago: https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2 https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2
  • yobid20 3y ago
    1.6GHz huh. Isnt half the entire Secret of Skinwalker Ranch show based on that exact frequency "mysterious signals at 1.6GHz" and everytime they see that spike a UAP appears? That's be pretty funny if its GOES bc the government hired travis to lead their secret UAP investigation program after he asked the pentagon if there were any known programs using this range.
    • plugger 3y ago
      Technically it's closer to 1.7GHz, but most Geostationary birds transmitting on L band are slightly below that. GOES is at 1.68GHz (roughly) while Polar orbiting satellites (think NOAA 15-19) are just above 1.7GHz.
    • plugger 3y ago
      thinking on this a bit more I suspect they would have been seeing iridium flares. that network operates from 1610-1626.5MHz and iridium flares are quite visually spectacular.
    • w-ll 3y ago
      I've had conversations with people blitz'd out their mind that where more coherent, intellectual, and factual than what's on History channel these days.
• Kye 3y ago
  A post on DIYing an air filter: https://mastodon.social/@burritojustice/110500850889913947 https://mastodon.social/@burritojustice/110500850889913947
• xwowsersx 3y ago
  Are there AQI forecasts? I'm trying to figure out when the air quality is supposed to improve. Is that information available?
  • Beefin 3y ago
    whenever it rains really, the jet stream will migrate air eastbound.
• paulmd 3y ago
  Bitches be like “I have my whole life ahead of me”. No you don’t, the fog is coming. The fog is coming. The fog is coming.
• cameldrv 3y ago
  Now that everyone has N95s from COVID, just wear one of those, problem solved.
• rhacker 3y ago
  Lol for once smoke in the news that I'm not (yet) breathing. (FarNorCal)
• blondie9x 3y ago
  Looks like Mars has finally come to us. I’ve said a lot on here about the climate. If we don’t stop or slow new consumption we will lose our planet.
  • throwanem 3y ago
    Thinking of it as our planet to lose has a lot to do with how we got to where we are. That's not a safe habit for humans to have.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  Oh, just relax, it'll eventually blow away as winter sets in. And in about 5-10 years, another episode like this, maybe on top of a severe drought, will occur. It'll be a bit worse than this one. And so on. Humans are just a step up from chimpanzees, and long-term planning doesn't seem to be what evolution has selected for.
• opdahl 3y ago
  This wildfire smoke has already crossed the Atlantic Ocean and is being detected in Norway. Source: https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/vg_-roykpartikler-fra-canada-har-nadd-norge-1.16438081 https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/vg_-roykpartikler-fra-canada-ha...
• politelemon 3y ago
  It's currently nighttime over the US, but the image is showing it's very clear. If I rewind time to yesterday afternoon it shows the haze. What's different about night?