As smoke from Canada enters Virginia, research links climate ... - Virginia Mercury

As smoke from Canada enters Virginia, research links climate change with more frequent wildfires - Virginia Mercury

As smoke from Canada enters Virginia, research links climate change with more frequent wildfires

Smoke from Western Wildfires bring an orange tint to the morning sun. (NBC12)

Dan Salkovitz, a meteorologist with the Department of Environmental Quality, recalls being in North Carolina in 2002 standing on a deck, smoke filling the air and a fire engine whizzing around in search of the blaze.

The local fire crew didn’t need to extinguish any actual flames, though; nothing nearby was causing the smoke. The fire was a thousand miles away in Canada. The same thing happened in 2021 and is happening again now.

Virginia last week was filled with a haze of varying degrees in different areas due to smoke from current wildfires in Canada that officials there said numbered more than 400, with about 230 listed as out of control as of Friday.

“My first reaction was, oh my gosh, this is not good,” said Salkovitz of the recent smoke coming in. “Darn it if we haven’t gotten the exact same [impact] as far as the weather pattern and result.”

The smoke traveled into Virginia as a result of northerly and northeast winds pushing the plumes down the East Coast, explained Chesnea Skeen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Sterling office.

Smoke has traveled into the state from western Canada before, but that largely went unnoticed because the longer travel distance meant it dissipated more before reaching Virginia, Skeen added. These most recent fires happened closer, in Quebec.

“Today was the worst of it,” Skeen said Thursday, but “unfortunately that pattern in the Northeast will likely continue next week.”

More low-lying and urban areas such as Northern Virginia experienced the worst of the impacts, with the smoke being denser and gravitating to the ground more, Skeen explained. Wind in more densely populated areas can’t as easily push the smoke out, unlike rural places.

Franconia in Fairfax County reached concerning air quality levels for a brief period Thursday, Salkovitz said, and Charlottesville also experienced high levels of smoke, being right in the path of the plume.

“It can vary each hour; think of how a smoke plume moves. It’s not uniform; it goes with the wind. It will be thicker for a little while and thinner for a little while,” Salkovitz said. “As long as the fires are burning they’re a threat. What they really, really need up there in Quebec is a serious dousing of rain.”

Short rain storms in Virginia collected the smoke and spat it out, Skeen said, referencing a picture she saw of rainfall that “did not look appetizing,” on the Wakefield office’s Twitter.

Just a little black ash from the
#CanadianWildFireSmoke from a surprise thunderstorm on my pool cover @NWSWakefieldVA @AndrewNBC12 pic.twitter.com/RCGzjprgNC

— Midlo Snow Maker (@MidloSnowMaker)
June 8, 2023

The main concern with the smoke is that it carries particulate matter 2.5, tiny particles that, if inhaled, may cause cardiovascular issues. Allergens that aren’t fully burned by the fires are also released into the air and can give people itchy noses and eyes, explained James Blando, chair of Old Dominion University’s School of Community and Environmental Health.

A study from ODU found that people with asthma had a persistent decrease in lung function for about a year after the Great Dismal Swamp fires in 2011.

“They may not have been severe, but they were noticeable,” Blando said of the lung deficiencies.

The Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond has a citizen air monitoring program called RVAir in which participants use personal devices to walk around and measure if particulate matter is present in the air.

While a detailed analysis showing elevated levels wasn’t immediately available, Devin Jefferson, who leads the initiative, said “those numbers are going up.”

“We can see that in real time,” said Jefferson.

Virginia’s smoky weather conditions coincided with the latest consequential vote by the State Air Pollution Control Board, which decided last Wednesday to withdraw Virginia from a carbon market known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The coincidence sparked debate on the role of climate change in the fires.

Acknowledging that the specific Canadian fires underway were naturally caused by a lightning strike, Blando said climate change is leading to an increase in frequency and severity of wildflires, while citing research from the International Panel on Climate Change that has found human-related activities are fueling climate change.

“Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gasses, have unequivocally caused global warming,” the IPCC report states. Greenhouse gases include carbon emissions from fossil fuel-run power plants and vehicle tailpipes.

A study published by the American Geophysical Union found that fall forest fires in California, “are likely to become increasingly frequent with continued warming and possibly gradual declines in fall precipitation,” as a result of human activity.

Planetary warming from climate change is leading to longer periods of drought that cause forests to dry up and more easily burn, Blando added. There’s also less snowmelt following winters that don’t see much accumulation.

“All of those sorts of things combine together to make a really nasty mix of creating conditions that are perfect for wildfires to burn and burn pretty wide areas,” Blando said.

Blando acknowledged that his statements also fall in line with findings from the field of climate attribution science, which is increasingly demonstrating direct links between climate change and natural disasters.

“The data clearly indicates that climate change is in fact a driver of what we’re seeing,” Blando said.

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