Canadian Wildfire Smoke Has Reached the Bay Area. Here’s What We Know

Updated 11:15 a.m. Tuesday

If you woke up Monday to a yellow tinge in the sky, only to find fairly normal air quality outside, you aren’t seeing things. Smoke from a series of wildfires ravaging central Canadian provinces has made its way to the West Coast, but its hazardous effects haven’t permeated most of the region’s lower atmosphere.

“Just because we see haze in the air and the visibility might be a little reduced, that doesn’t mean that the air quality at the surface is necessarily degraded,” said Alex Dodd, a meteorologist with the Bay Area Air District.

The agency issued an air quality advisory for wildfire smoke warning of smoky, hazy skies and possibly unhealthy air quality conditions early this week. On Tuesday, it extended the advisory through Wednesday.

Most of the smoke is gathering between 3,000 and 10,000 feet, Dodd said. People who live at elevations above 2,000 feet — in the Berkeley and Oakland hills and some parts of the Peninsula — could feel some slight change in their air quality, and if they’re extremely sensitive, might need to adjust their behavior, but for most residents, he said, there isn’t a huge risk.

“Be aware of your own health if you have asthma, emphysema or other respiratory conditions and you start to experience itchy eyes or a little bit of a dry, scratchy cough,” he said. “Then you need to take it easy.”

Dodd suggests keeping windows closed, staying inside and having an in-home air filtration system set up if you feel the physical effects of smoke.

The haze has traveled 1,500 miles from Manitoba, where officials declared a state of emergency last week amid a series of significant fires. More than 25,000 people have had to evacuate the province, along with neighboring Alberta and Saskatchewan. As of Tuesday, crews have struggled to contain the blazes.

The provinces sit above the upper Midwest of the United States, and have caused more significant air quality impacts in neighboring states, like North Dakota, along with small pockets of South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana.

But Dodd said Canadian fires can lift smoke tens of thousands of feet into the air. High winds, like those over the weekend, can spread particles long distances under the right conditions.

He said a lingering trough of low surface pressure over California is making it somewhat hard to predict how conditions could change in the next few days, but they should get clearer, thanks to a deep marine layer and northerly onshore winds.