"Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season"

 June 1st marks the "official" start of hurricane season.

I declined to participate when it came time to renew my affiliation with The Salt Mine's response apparatus. I'm getting to old to bunk on troop ships or a cot in a tent some place...

Another Update, 09/17

 SO, now that we're sharing our smoke with the rest of the country...

...here's what it looks like in front of Schloss Drang right now:

©2020, D.W.Drang & The Cluemeter

So we thought it was going to clear by today. Turns out that what rain we got is not at high enough altitudes to do the trick, and more importantly, was not accompanied by winds strong enough to do it.

Despite that nearly "zero-zero" visibility at surface level, air quality as reported by WA Air Quality Monitoring and the Washington Smoke Blog has improved from "Hazardous" to "merely" "Unhealthy" or even "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups" throughout much of the state. 

Huzzah, and all that.

The WA Smoke Blog has several blogposts over the past few days that review the data, and also reports that Seattle has had some of the worst air quality in the world the last week or so.

I believe that we need to emphasize that, yes, this is the worst air quality on record, but the record goes back a whopping 20 years, so several grains of salt may be in order.

Cliff Mass is a meteorologist, and professor of meteorology at the University of Washington*. He has a blog: Cliff Mass Weather Blog. The topic of his post for the day is The Extraordinary Longevity of Wildfire Smoke. Good one, accompanied by easy to understand maps.

Yesterday he had The End is in Sight which included charts and graphs that might be a little, um, esoteric. (And a satellite photo which predicted the least coast being smoky.)

By the way, in case the whole COVID issue hasn't convinced anyone that "the models" are problematic, several of Professor Mass' blog posts this week have discussed why "the models" have failed to predict exactly what the hell is going on with this wildfire smoke with anything that comes close to accuracy, so maybe it's time we all realized that "the models" require a large enough dose of salt to be hazardous to our blood pressure...

...Among other things, many or most weather forecasting models fail to take the fact that wildfire smoke will reflect solar radiation, resulting in temperatures that are 20-30 degrees cooler than the forecasts produce.

*You may have heard of Professor Mass because he posted a blog post about the antifa domestic terrorist's rampage in Seattle, comparing one particular night's activities to Kristallnacht. This got him "cancelled". Otherwise respectable local journalists have declared that one should "never use a Nazi comparison". No matter how apt. And, presumably, especially if the subject is activity approved by the left.

The cancellation was literal, BTW, as he had a show on the local NPR station talking about the science of weather. "Had" being the operative word. He was already on thin ice due to a tendency to explain how and why the topic of conversation is not, in fact, caused by anthropogenic climate change.

UPDATE 9/13

 Here's what the sun looked like at about 4:30 PM yesterday:

©2020 D.W. Drang and The Cluemeter

And here's what the view down my street looked like this morning:

©2020 D.W. Drang and The Cluemeter

And there's still a school in here somewhere:

©2020 D.W. Drang and The Cluemeter

Looks like fog, but it's not moist. There's a little condensation on Mrs. Drang's car, which hasn't been driven since Friday, but none on mine.

Supposedly will rain tomorrow night or Tuesday, which will help to suppress this, but may cause other problems.  There's not as much ash in this as there has been in past similar events. In 2017 when I left to work Hurricane Harvey (which turned into working Irma, but never mind that now) we were getting actual ash.

Smoke on the water...

 The entire state has smelled like a campfire this past week. 

Earlier in the week, we had easterly winds sending smoke from fire on the east (or "dry") side of the state over the Cascades and sending air quality, even along the shores of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea, into the "unhealthy for sensitive groups" or even "unhealthy" ranges.

Thursday night the wind shifted, now coming from the south, and now we are blanketed with smoke from wildfires in Oregon and California.

Here's a link to Washington's Air Quality Monitoring Network map. (LINK.) And a screen grab of current readings; note that we are in the Very Unhealthy to Hazardous range pretty much all over, until you get to elevation.

Edited to add: That spot of green turns out to be a monitoring station that doesn't "do" smoke.< br/>The stuff it <i>does</i> monitor is just fine...

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Here are some pics from my corner of the 98-double-ought-3.

©2020 D.W. Drang & the Cluemeter

View out front Friday (9/11) afternoon, looking south. Traffic permitting, we have an unobstructed view to the major east-west thoroughfare about a quarter mile away.

Looking kind of misty, but it's not humidity, it's smoke.

©2020 D.W. Drang & the Cluemeter

Same view this morning.

©2020 D.W. Drang & the Cluemeter

The elementary school around the corner from us, also this morning. This gives an idea of just how yellow the sky is.

Reminds me of the "Yellow Wind" we used to get in Korea, when the wind was out of the Gobi. (Mind you, from the stories, after spending several years living in Shanghai, my sister would probably shrug this off...)

I see from the Wikipedia article I linked there that the Yellow Wind has been exacerbated the last several decades due to desertification and deforestation arising from Soviet industrial policies. 

Thanks, Commies!

Speaking of which, wildfires in western states have been exacerbated by green policies preventing prescribed, controlled burns and the clearing of underbrush which fuels the fires. Not to mention California's refusal to maintain dams and reservoirs. Because who needs water in these cities you built in the desert?

Here's another useful web site for tracking this: WA Smoke. It's a collaboration between state, tribal, local, and federal agencies. Hosted on Blogspot, I was surprised to be able to access it at work, which blocks nearly all social media, and especially blogs.  

Here's their entry for this morning:

Gasp! How much longer???

Quick answers: at least another day and a half in Western WA. 2-3 days in eastern WA.

Gradual clearing will commence on the WA coast on Sunday from west to east, and it will be Monday before that pushes across the state. For western WA, this means we're close to the peak of the episode, but much of eastern WA will deteriorate further today before it starts to get better. The size of the Oregon smoke plumes parked offshore is so "super-massive", and the fires themselves are very smoky, so smoke will continue to pour into the state for a while to come. And there are also several fires within WA to contend with.

I can't help thinking of the Tom Lehrer song "Pollution": "Don't drink the water/And don't breathe the air!"