Smoke from wildfires out West reaches Massachusetts

By Andres Picon Globe Correspondent August 24, 2018

Smoke from the Western wildfires has reached Massachusetts, the National Weather Service reports, just days after weather observers at the Mount Washington Observatory reported seeing the smoke above New Hampshire.

Meteorologists at the NWS first detected the smoke above the state Friday morning. Massachusetts residents could smell the smoke in the air under a hazier-than-normal sky, Lenore Correia, a NWS meteorologist, said in a telephone interview.

The thin layer of smoke blanketed most of New England Friday morning, but “at this point, it’s quite patchy,” Correia said Friday afternoon. “It’s still over us.”

As smoke from the wildfires along the West Coast and Southwestern Canada rises, it gets swept toward the Northeast by a jet stream. The appearance of and effects of the smoke on New England depend on the intensity of the wildfires, the amount of smoke that bellows into the air, and the strength and direction of the jet stream that carries the smoke, Correia said.

Although satellite images showed “a clear layer” of smoke over New England Friday morning, the smoke is not expected to affect the people, wildlife, or weather in the region, Correia said.

“[The smoke] should be so high in the sky that it’s not really affecting the surface at all,” she said. “It’s quite dispersed at this point.”

“[The smoke is] not dense enough across most of S New England to limit warming,” NWS Boston said in a tweet Friday afternoon. “Cape/Islands likely seeing the gray-est skies.”

Western smoke reaching New England is a somewhat regular occurrence, as the size and intensity of the wildfires tend to peak every summer, Correia said.

“This can happen whenever there’s wildfires in the Northwest,” she said.

Firefighters in California this summer have been trying to mitigate the damage caused by the Mendocino Complex Fire — the largest wildfire in the state’s history.

Andres Picon can be reached at andres.picon@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @andpicon.

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