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Blame Canada: B.C.'s 2018 wildfires caused air pollution alerts in New York City

Canada is also impacted by wildfire smoke coming here from abroad, such as dirty air from wildfires in Russia arriving in British Columbia and the north

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Dangerous air pollution that triggered days of air-quality health alerts in New York City has been traced back to Canada.

The source of the dirty air that set off air pollution warnings and health advisories over the United States’ largest city in the summer of 2018 was not a belching factory in southern Ontario, however. It traveled much further.

Researchers at Yale University traced the air pollution to wildfires in British Columbia.

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August, 2018, was a notably bad time for fires in B.C., including huge fires in Tweedsmuir South Provincial Park, caused by lightning strikes.

The state of New York issued air quality health advisories in the New York City metro area and Long Island on Aug. 16 and 17.

Smoke maps based on satellite imagery showed the arrival of a smoke plume over the city on Aug. 16 and leaving two days later.

Flames from a wildfire close in on Kelowna, BC as the forest fire spreads near the Westside Road in West Kelown by Lake Okanagan Resort, July 2015.
Flames from a wildfire close in on Kelowna, BC as the forest fire spreads near the Westside Road in West Kelown by Lake Okanagan Resort, July 2015. Photo by Shawn Talbot Photography

Using air quality measurements along with smoke maps and air parcel back-trajectory computer modeling, researchers traced the atmospheric flow backwards in time. The air mass that brought the pollution warnings earlier passed over the central coast of western Canada during a particularly busy wildfire season.

It passed through Canada and then the northern part of the United States and descended to surface level in New York.

By the end of the day on Aug. 17, wind patterns shifted and cleaner air parcels that had not passed through wildfire areas arrived over New York. The air quality improved dramatically, the researchers say in an article in a recent issue of the scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

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“Biomass burning, which occurs on a large scale during wildfires and some controlled burns, is a major source of air pollutants that impact air quality, human health, and climate,” writes Drew Gentner, a professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale, on behalf of a research team.

Wildfires and controlled forest and agricultural burns all feature burning biomass and release gasses such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere along with small, floating particles, including black carbon.

Wildfires rage in the British Columbia in 2017.
Wildfires rage in the British Columbia in 2017. Photo by John Innes photo/Submitted

Along with environmental damage, the airborne pollutants are associated with respiratory and cardiovascular disease and higher mortality rates, the researchers say.

The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of Connecticut and New Jersey, is home to more than 20 million people.

It has long been known that smoke from large fire incidents can travel long distances. An engrossing part of many forest fires around the world is seeing photos of their plume as seen from space, stretching far and wide.

A previous study had traced air pollution over Washington, DC, to a wildfire in Quebec in July, 2002. Similar studies traced smoke from Canadian wildfires to Maryland.

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Canada is also impacted by wildfire smoke coming here from abroad, such as dirty air from wildfires in Russia arriving in British Columbia and the north. Substantial forest fires in Siberia in the summer of 2003 brought the highest seasonal mean concentrations of carbon monoxide and ozone ever recorded at air quality testing sites in northwestern Canada.

We are likely to see more of this.

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“The impacts of wildfire smoke, both regionally and at long distances, will become increasingly important in the coming years, with the number and severity of wildfires predicted to increase with climate change,” Gentner writes.

“It is increasingly important to understand the environmental and health effects that may be associated, including long-distance transport.”

Better understanding of long-distance movement of air is important for predicting and managing air quality health risks beyond the area immediately around the actual fire.

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The air monitoring data came from six monitoring stations; one in Pinnacle State Park, which is 240 kilometres southwest of Niagara Falls, and five on Long Island Sound, including Yale’s coastal field station in Guillford, CT, 150 kilometres from New York City.

The same research paper tracks the source of a second air-pollution warning in the New York area at the end of August. It was traced to biomass burning in California, although likely from intentional crop fires, the paper says.

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