DNR air quality map.
There’s smoke over Iowa again from the Canadian wildfires, but National Weather Service Meteorologist, Brad Small says that smoke is high up and not causing problems.
“We’ve seen a little bit over northwest and west-central Iowa in the midday here. It’s much worse to our north however from the eastern Dakotas into Minnesota it’s actually getting down to the surface there where we’ve had visibility dropped to a few miles in places,” Small says.
He says a variety of factors impact how low the smoke hangs in the air. “Smoke density windspeed thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere all come into play it’s fairly rare to get smoked down to the surface this far removed from the fires down here in Iowa,” Small says, “but it can’t happen and hopefully in this case it will stay to our north and northeast.”
Small says the smoke issues were bigger in New York and other eastern states recently because they are closer to the source. He says things could change in Iowa. “The biggest concerns that looks like for the next couple of days are going to be northeast of us, the smoke might get down to the surface in far northeast Iowa,” he says. Small says the rest of the state shouldn’t see any low hanging smoke.
The DNR’s air quality measurements show air quality concerns only in a small area in the northwest and southwest corners of the state.