One More Smokey Day Wyoming, Then Skies Clear

We've been waiting for this and it's almost here.

All you have to do it put up with one more hot day.

This will also be one more day with a lot of smoke in the air.

Then, slowly, it all starts moving out as cooler temperatures move in along with some thunderstorms.

That means the smoke will move on and the rain will help wash the air out.

Sorry, but this is going to be some dirty rain.

This is the relief we've been waiting for.

Below is the forecast from our regional weather man Don Day

Enough with the smoke already.

This new forecast does not mean that we will be 100% smoke-free.

But things will be much better.

There is a lot on fire in Canada, and that smoke now covers most of the United States.

This rain will help to put out those fires.

None of these fires are in Wyoming.

But we are certainly feeling the effects of it.

You can follow this smoke map at this link.

It's fire season again.

This is all typical for this time of year.

The yellow and green dots on the smoke map are the air quality index.

Little fire icons indicate where the fires are.

Pulling the map back, we can see fires to the west of Wyoming in states like Utah and Idaho.

Dry air is typical this time of year. Lighting strikes from thunderstorms that produce very little rain will cause fires in these vast wilderness areas.

This warming and dryer weather will continue as long as those high-pressure systems hang over the Western states.

The good news is that fire seasons over the past few decades have been less severe, not greater.

While some years produce more wildfires than others, the overall trend, in North America and Globally is down.

Wildfires, especially in arid parts of the United States, have always been a natural part of the environment and likely always will.

Data displayed by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, or NOAA, show no discernable trend for increased drought in the United States in over 125 years.

The U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reports data on U.S. wildfires back as far as 1926.

According to NIFC data, the number of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, 100 years ago.

Current acres burned run about 1/4th to 1/5th of the record values which occurred in the 1930s.

At that time, the peak wildfire burn was over 52 million acres.

In the decade since 2010, the peaks have been 10 million acres or less.