It was cloudy and rainy a lot last week, so you may not have noticed all the wildfire smoke in the air. Since I work near the foothills, I can use them as a quick visibility reference. On Tuesday (August 8
th), they were definitely looking a little hazy (as you can see in the picture below), and I got several messages asking if it was smoke.
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| Looking northwest from CSU Atmospheric Science Campus August 8, 2017 at 5:30 PM. |
We checked and noticed that PM
2.5 concentrations were elevated that day, peaking around 25 ug/m
3.
As you can see from the HMS below, we were getting smoke from the Northwest pretty much all week. I noticed haziness again on Friday and took this picture from the roof of the Atmospheric Science building (out on Laporte Ave in west Fort Collins) looking north. Comparing this to the time series, we can see that concentrations had actually decreased from earlier that morning when they had built up to 17 ug/m3.
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| Looking north from the Atmospheric Science building in west Fort Collins at 1:30 PM on Friday, August 11, 2017. |
The smoke plumes seemed to be moving around and over us a lot up here in Fort Collins, but the smoke seemed to not make it down to Denver as often. Thankfully, concentrations in Fort Collins did not get as high as on Tuesday for the rest of the week, and you can also that the afternoon rains kept helping clear the air. It was not until Friday evening when I saw another cool, really red sunset (unfortunately all my pictures were pretty blurry). There were some local fires on August 10th, but they did not seem to produce smoke plumes that stood out in the HMS product from the smoke transported from the Northwest.
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| HMS Smoke Products August 8th AM, August 8th PM, August 9th AM, August 9th PM, August 10th AM, August 10th PM, August 11th AM, and August 11th PM. |
Looks like the smoke is skirting past us today (Monday, August 14
th), but we will see what the rest of the week holds!
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