New Jersey: When Will The Smoke Clear and How To Track It
New Jerseyans were alarmed that the skies were a hazy orange yesterday due to the Canadian wildfires. According to weather forecasters, the air quality is looking to improve Thursday (June 8). The haze should be mostly gone by Friday (June 9), per NJ. com.
“My sense is that by tomorrow there’s little or no smoke,” Joe Slezak, a meteorologist with WeatherWorks, a Hackettstown-based private weather forecasting company, told the publication Thursday morning. “The air quality is not going to become pristine — we haven’t had pristine air quality for quite a while.”
“As we get toward midday today, you’re probably talking about another appreciable difference in the smoke once the sun starts warming things up,” Slezak said. “The fact that the smoke is already thinner is going to help because instead of the sun being entirely blocked, we’re at least getting some sunlight through already.”
However, compared to Wednesday’s air quality, it will still get better. On Wednesday, readings were above 200 which is described as “very unhealthy.”
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“So there will be improvement,” Slezak said. “There was already significant improvement compared to (Wednesday) and then we’re going to see additional significant improvement today.”
If you are looking for a real-time update on your town’s air quality, you can track it at AirNow, home of the U.S. Air Quality Index. The website allows you to use their interactive map to “zoom out to get the big picture or drill down to see data for a single air quality monitor,” the website says. You can be precise as you want and search by your town or zip code.
Wednesday’s air quality was the worst in 43 years. Previously the worst day was on July 21, 1980 when it was the earliest for federal data to be available. The index hit 286 out of a scale of 0-500.