Wildfires across West send smoke over New Mexico
New Mexico skies might clear for weekend, but fresh wave of smoke possible next week
For several days, a thickening haze has obscured the normally crystalline views of the mountain ranges of Northern New Mexico. The smoke has traveled from up to 1,200 miles away in Montana, Oregon and California, where 1.4 million acres of land are engulfed in flames.
The particulates from those blazes could be mingling with smoke from two small burns near Santa Fe County — an 11-acre fire ignited by lightning over the weekend in the Jemez Mountains and 1,870 acres burning northwest of Abiquiú.
Fire season should have ended two months ago, but dry days across the West Coast and record heat — with temperatures as high as 105 degrees last month in Portland, Ore. — have created the perfect conditions for wildfires, according to meteorologists and climate experts.
The severe fires in the Northwest have been dwarfed by the devastating impact of Hurricane Harvey last week, the largest hurricane to make landfall in 12 years, and the expected effects of Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm that was pounding islands in the Caribbean on Wednesday and was heading toward Florida. Both natural occurrences raise questions about how weather extremes are connected to a warming climate.
The governor of Washington declared a state of emergency Wednesday as the air in that state turned a dirty orange hue and ash fell like rain. In Seattle, the smoke was so dense it shrouded from view buildings and homes just a quarter-mile away.
“You can’t even see across your neighborhood because the air is so thick,” said Brian Guyer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque.
For New Mexico to face the effects of fires in the Northwest, he said, is abnormal. Usually, New Mexico will only see air quality impacts from fires in Arizona or Utah.
“There is such a large area of forest that is on fire that it is really pushing a lot of smoke into the atmosphere,” Guyer said.
Visibility has been nearly halved in Santa Fe. A clear day allows views 60 miles across the horizon; for the last few days, however, it has been difficult to see farther than 30 miles into the distance. A high-pressure weather system in the Four Corners area has pulled smoke from the west and north into the southern Rocky Mountains and New Mexico in a clockwise motion. The strange effect has caused the distant mountain ranges to vanish from view, making the skyline look flat and gray.
The haze and air quality are expected to improve Thursday through Saturday, he said, but the return of another high-pressure system next week is expected to bring a fresh wave of smoke into Northern New Mexico, and the Western fires may burn until October.
Air pollution is in the moderate range on the air quality index, Guyer said, but “if you get a little bit higher up, the air quality is deteriorating. It starts affecting folks that are sensitive to particulates — [and experience] difficulty breathing, scratchy eyes. And if it further deteriorates, it is unhealthy for most people. That is the kind of stuff they are seeing in Oregon and Washington.”
The air quality in Santa Fe may see fur-
“You can’t even see across your neighborhood because the air is so thick.” Brian Guyer, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque
ther decline in late September. The U.S. Forest Service plans to burn 1,500 acres in the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed east of Santa Fe; 2,300 acres in Mesitas, southwest of Abiquiú; and just over 100 acres on Borrego Mesa, southeast of Truchas, as early as Sept. 21. The agency says the work improves the health of the forest.
Intentional burns set last fall by the U.S. Forest Service, however, submerged Santa Fe in a cloud of smoke for several days.
So far this year, 7.8 million acres have burned as a result of wildfires across the U.S., more than 2 million more than the 10-year average, which has hovered around 5.5 million acres per year.
In contrast, a wet spring with late snowfall and an active monsoon season in New Mexico have created conditions for a mild fire season.
The state has seen 13 fires this spring and summer, with just over 92,000 acres burned. At 20,000 acres and still active, the Corral Fire in the Gila Wilderness has been the largest this year, according to InciWeb, the wildfire information website of the U.S. Forest Service’s National Wildfire Coordinating Group.
David Gutzler, a climate scientist at The University of New Mexico, said aggressive natural events such as intense wildfires and hurricanes are a matter of probability.
“There is no immediate, direct, specific connections between a fire and a hurricane and climate change,” he said. But “climate change makes all of these extreme events somewhat more likely. If temperatures go up, then the conditions for a severe fire in the Pacific Northwest go up … the odds of something very drastic go up.”
He said a warming climate may impact extreme weather events but is coupled with a “force multiplier” — the human impact on the environment, which can range from managing forests in a destructive way to paving roads in the Gulf Coast, a practice that prevents natural drainage from occurring.
“Climate change often takes a system that has been stressed already for other reasons and adds to that stress,” Gutzler said, “and thereby makes extreme events more extreme.”