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The hope for relief from smoke-filled skies that weather and air quality forecasters once thought may arrive as the work week began was replaced Monday by the reality that the cloud of soot resulting from fires up and down the West Coast is sticking around at least a few more days.
It won’t be until much later this week that a low-pressure system is expected to move out a stagnant, pollutant-collecting marine layer, National Weather Service forecasters said.
Even that is no guarantee.
“It looks like Friday when the trough will kick in over the Pacific Northwest,” meteorologist Cynthia Palmer said. “Hopefully by then, we’ll get a better push.”
The only push that came Monday was to the streak of Spare the Air days issued by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Officials extended the alert through Wednesday, making it 30 consecutive days that it’s been illegal to burn wood in the Bay Area.
The last day without an alert was Aug. 17. The record has obliterated the old mark of 14 consecutive alerts set during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise and equals the number of Spare the Air days combined the previous four years.
At noon, Redwood City’s official reading of fine particulate matter in the air was 191, the only one in the region above 190. Oakland, San Jose, Redwood City, Pleasanton, San Francisco and Berkeley, all above 190 for most of the morning, had dropped into a range spanning 181-189.
The best air in the region was in Napa, which measured 171. Anything from 150-200 is considered unhealthy air for everyone, and any reading between 201-250 is considered very unhealthy air. San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley all went over 200 late Sunday night.
The haze also kept visibility through the region between one and three miles, Palmer said.
“The marine layer is still in place, and it’s still trapping all the pollutants at the lower levels,” meteorologist Brian Garcia said. “What we’re really looking for are some scouring winds to come through and mix with some vertical movement with the air mass.”
That mixing will help “blow the lid off” the marine layer, Garcia said, and could “help clean us out.”
Still, Palmer said forecasters are waiting to see what effect the trough ultimately will have because of the sheer volume of smoke hovering above the West Coast. According to the California Department of Fire and Forestry Protection, 28 wildfires were burning in California on Monday morning and had scorched 2.8 million acres.
Major wildfires also were burning in Oregon and Washington, and a smoke cloud extended from Washington down the West Coast to Mexico and to about five miles out over the Pacific Ocean, forecasters said.
The new trough could potentially bring down smoke from Oregon and Washington, forecasters and air quality officials said.
“An on-shore flow is what we really could use,” air district spokesman Aaron Richardson said. “But one of the problems is that there is so much smoke over the ocean that we might just exchange smoke for smoke.”
The better news is that temperatures continued to remain bearable. Forecasters said temperatures would migrate into the mid-80 and higher-80s in the far inland areas as the week progresses, while the coasts will continue to hover in the high-60s.
It will be a muggy heat, Palmer said.
“The marine layer isn’t fully mixing out every day or retreating to the coast,” she said. “It’s stagnant, so it’s collecting moisture along with smoke. That’s going to bring a higher humidity.”
