Smoke has caused temperature forecasts to go crazy | Hacker News Reader

Smoke has caused temperature forecasts to go crazy

cliffmass.blogspot.com

298 pointsluu313 comments

I'm in southeastern Canada years ago smoke from Quebec forest fires made the sky red. The soil where I am from is also red. It was like living on Mars. The fun ends quickly when your throat gets scratchy and there is no where you can go to escape it the air in your house has to come from outside too.

I'm not looking forward to any smoke now my dad has COPD, IPF, is on oxygen, and he's elderly. If we get any amount of smoke here it will be the end of him. It's hard enough trying to keep him from contracting SARS-Cov-2 and developing covid-19.

>I'm not looking forward to any smoke now my dad has COPD, IPF, is on oxygen, and he's elderly. If we get any amount of smoke here it will be the end of him. It's hard enough trying to keep him from contracting SARS-Cov-2 and developing covid-19

Seriously, get a HEPA rated air filter. Speaking as someone who has some serious lung issues, it's literally life changing/saving. Honeywell sells a number of models, cost is between 150-270 USD, depending on the size/amount of air you want moved.

The University of Michigan made an instructional video showing how you can easily make an air purifier out of a box fan and a HEPA-rated furnace filter for $25: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU

It won't be as good as a purpose-built machine, but it will be far better than nothing at all.

TheWirecutter found it reduced particulate matter in a room by 87%, if you do it right. They also make clear important caveats about this method -- in short, this works in a pinch, but probably should not be used in place of a purpose-built filter if you want one for year-round use. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-purifier...

Even easier: just place the 20”x20” filter BEHIND the box fan. The vacuum will keep it in place nicely.

Be sure to note the airflow direction arrows on the filter.

I put it behind the fan as well, but now I'm curious if there a difference in air quality between the two methods?

if the filter is the same distance from the fan, there really isn't much of a difference. Filter after the fan is perhaps a bit better from a turbulence and noise perspective. https://www.quora.com/Where-should-an-air-filter-be-placed-r...

One thing to keep in mind though is most filters have an expected direction of airflow, which does matter both to its efficacy and efficiency.

I put the filter behind the fan, the reason being that the filter will be sucked onto the fan, thus providing a better seal between the fan and filter than it would be if the filter was in the front and being actively pushed away from the fan by the air.

Putting the filter behind the fan ensures you have clean air contacting the fan blades. This prevents contaminants from accumulating on the fan blades over time and reduces cleaning.

I have two of these running right now. According to my air quality meter, PM 2.5 has fallen from about ~250 indoors to ~40. (My meter shows ~600 outside, which is about 3x what the government website shows for my area)

Government website most likely using an algorithm that pools data and takes into consideration multiple readings, sometimes lagging by a few hours. Your sensor gives the instant value in your immediate environment (assuming it is well-calibrated and installed outside of local influences such as kitchen fans, dryer lint etc etc)

What do you use to measure air quality?

I use this thing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0787Z5DK9

I'm not sure how accurate it is or isn't. It reacts to the filters, for example, or if I hold it in front of the filter it'll reach a very low number, conversely if I take it to other parts of the house or outside it'll increase. I've done a few trials like that and it seems directionally accurate, but I can't speak to the numerical accuracy.

It measures PM 2.5 and 10 and has a button to show graphs over time for ~12 hours. Battery life is pretty good, I usually leave it detecting on the charger, but I've had it in handheld mode for several hours and stayed above 80%. It's super simple to use.

One thing I don't like about it is that it has a cheap plastic hinge that is supposed to let it stand up, but it broke on me after a couple uses. It doesn't seem to matter though if it's standing up or laying down, it still reads pretty much the same.

I wish it had a way to export data to my computer or maybe an app.

Portland burbs here: box fans and filters of all types sold out days ago. A lot of people here doing the box fan filter.

If you have COPD or other serious lung issues, don't get just one HEPA filter. These machines are rated to filter the air in an area that's certain number of square feet, based on how many CFM of air they move. Get at least enough of them that your whole living space is covered, and deploy them throughout the entire dwelling. You may want more individual machines so you can run them on a lower fan setting, which produces less noise. Assuming availability of outlets, you can also go for a larger number of smaller machines, each with a lower CFM rating, which should also reduce the noise level somewhat.

I personally use Winix machines. I don't think it matters much in terms of efficacy which brand you use, so, consider the cost of replacement filters here. The machines I bought were around $200 each, and worth every penny, IMHO.

My machines are both made for environments with pets, so they have a pre-filter to catch large things like dog fur, and they also have an activated carbon filter to pull odors out of the air. The carbon filter is quite effective. Unfortunately, I was able to test this first-hand, by observing that I could no longer smell dog poop after about 10 minutes of the machine running in the room said poop was in.

I wouldn't worry about silly features like accompanying smartphone apps, or any kind of "ion technology." IMO, that stuff is mostly marketing fluff, and just adds complexity to what should basically be a small fan with a filtered intake.

I've found my machines to be very effective in cleaning the air inside my apartment. I've been lucky enough so far to not have any issues from the Bay Area smoke, despite having asthma and allergies. I credit that to my HEPA filter machines, as well as wearing an N95 mask outside whenever the AQI is too high.

As an aside, I once put one of my machines (each rated for around 300 sq. ft., IIRC) inside my bathroom, which is no more than about 30 sq. ft., for a while. Eventually, the air in there smelled so clean, it literally took me back to the days when I used to regularly work in a class 1,000 (ISO 3) electronics clean room. "Class 1,000" means the air inside is supposed to contain no more than 10^3 particle >= 0.1 µm in diameter per m^3 of air. Once you've smelled the air inside a decently high level clean room, you'll recognize it when you come across it again. It smells like a glorious whole lot of nothing, which makes my allergies happy. :-). For reference, ordinary, unfiltered, not-apparently-dusty air typically has about 10^6 particles >=0.1 µm per m^3.

The area covered is somewhat useless — actual coverage depends hugely on how leaky the building is and how windy it is. The goal is to get enough air through filters that the incoming smoky air is diluted enough by filtered air to achieve a good average particle count.

A handheld particle counter helps a lot.

What you say is true as far as it goes. It also depends on the height of the ceiling, because it's actually about a volume of air rather than a surface area of floor space.

What you really want to know is how long it takes to recirculate the entire air volume of the space you're interested in. But, for a typical dwelling that has ~10-ft ceilings and isn't too leaky, that square footage number is a really good guideline.

Any recs on handheld devices? Looking to buy and would love to get some suggestions!

This. My sleep has greatly improved since putting a HEPA filter in my bedroom and I rather enjoy the white noise of the fan. Good units like the Sharp Plasmacluster I use have a large, slow moving blower (not a higher speed fan with fewer, larger blades) so the noise is very subtle.

I also have HEPA filters throughout my house. They have improved my sleep and reduced my allergies even.

If you have central heat you can sometimes configure the thermostat to run the blower separately from the heating element. This creates a nice positive pressure environment. If you have a MERV 10 or better filter installed on the furnace then it's actually pulling in filtered air, as any high enough MERV filter will filter PM2.5 with a decent efficiency. I think they start filtering PM2.5 at about MERV 10, and by MERV 13 they're filtering 90% or more of PM2.5.

Where is the positive pressure element coming from? Most residential HVAC systems are closed and do not have an intake (note: not commercial, which are typically in the USA required to include an air exchanger or other fresh air ventilation component).

Your typical 1980s construction home likely does not have mechanical ventilation, the only inlet would be for fresh air to facilitate the combustion in the furnace (alongside an exhaust for carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide).

AFAIK, most new construction houses for the past decade or so have some amount of air intake, because houses are built too 'tight' now, but this might be somewhat location dependent.

MERV Table with filtration amounts - https://www.lakeair.com/merv-rating-explanation/

I'm guessing the table lists filtration for a single pass through the filter. But through constant circulation a greater reduction in air particulate can be achieved. Anyone know this for certain?

I would like to know this as well but the way the products are advertised, it would seem that this isn't a single pass-through measurement (see The Wirecutter)

Also something to consider: electrostatic in-line filtering, which generally combines electrostatic cells plus 2 levels of filters

My 2c is that they will be popular the way hand sanitizer once was, I could see shortages so the earlier you get your order the better!

Your prediction is correct. Home Depot's shelves were picked bare at my Seattle store.

Or in a pinch, a HEPA vacuum cleaner. Double points if you rig it to take in outside air and vent it inside to create a positive pressure of filtered air.

This should work.

Would you say more about the double points idea? Our Coway is struggling to filter our small apartment just recirculating air. It would be amazing to be able to bring in filtered cool outside air, but I haven’t found any HEPA purifiers on the market with an intake hose or window mount (short of a permanent HVAC).

Take HEPA equipped vacuum cleaner. Put nozzle outside to suck in outside air. Put main unit inside to exhaust filtered air inside.

Seal window crack however which way you can. Tape and a block of wood with a 3” circular hole? Voilà.

Might be a good idea to pre-filter nozzle air to keep your HEPA for the small stuff.

And have a good stock of replacement vacuum filters. And earplugs...

Energy auditors will install a “fan door” to build pressure inside your home to smoke-test for air leaks. This is the same concept, except filtering the incoming air and helping to ensure your air-leaks are 1-way: out.

But this is all no competition for a stiff wind.

Earplugs! Good call.

IQAir sells kits for directing the intake or output of their air filters to a vent. It's super expensive and obviously aimed at commercial customers, but I'm sure they'll sell it to you.

How exactly is your Coway struggling? Typically it is harder for a filter to clean the air in your apartment when you are bringing in extra outside air.

If you have a good filter but it is not managing to clean the air in your apartment, the most likely problems are that your apartment is too large for the filter's capacity, or that your apartment leaks air in from outside so that your filter can't counteract the effects of the leaking.

Yes, apartment too large and poorly sealed.

> Typically it is harder for a filter to clean the air in your apartment when you are bringing in extra outside air

That was my point. Bringing in outside air would be a luxury.

Btw just ordered passive filters for the windows for super cheap- perhaps that will move the needle on how much outside air we can bring in while maintaining indoor AQI.

Still curious about the positive pressure idea. If it’s effective, I’d expect someone to productize it.

They're a little hard to come by right now.

> The fun ends quickly when your throat gets scratchy and there is no where you can go to escape it the air in your house has to come from outside too.

What boggles my mind is why, given the amount of usual air pollution and spikes like that, people care more if their kale is exactly organic.

Smoke from the west is affecting the weather in Montreal, Quebec right now.

Get an air filter

Yup. It's been a fun weekend. Everyone in the family is feeling the cabin fever, but outside (Bellevue, WA) smells like inside of a fireplace. We put a few boxed fans with HEPA filters around the house and they are now black. In hindsight, should've bought more filters, but all the stores and Amazon are sold out for the near future.

Speaking about the future, this puts planning in perspective. With the climate changing, remote work, covid and all, the way we live in the next 20 years might look somewhat different than past 50. The new "American Dream" might be a tiny condo with great AC, minimal footprint, solar energy and rain water storage...etc.

It's a good time to ponder what the real estate and living of the future could look like!

Portland burbs here. It's been a crazy week for us. When those howling east winds started a week ago Monday (9/7) we got some smoke initially that evening as fires started flaming up immediately with that dry wind. Then we awoke on Tuesday to the pleasant surprise of blue skies as I guess the winds shifted just a bit so that the smoke missed us here, but down valley we were seeing some very apocalyptic pics. And we could look to the south and see the smoke plume. The good air stayed around till Thursday afternoon. We've had AQI up into the 400s on occasion since. Yesterday it went down a bit into the mid 300s. Today it's down to about 250 and we're just elated that it's gone from hazardous to very unhealthy. The house has been closed up since last Thursday, we're fortunate to have a HEPA filter that move to whatever room we're in at the time - but it's definitely still noticeable - scratchy throat, tight chest, headache, eyes stinging by evening. We've gone through one of the HEPA filter cartridges already.

I hadn't been out of the house from last Thursday until this afternoon when I ventured out with an N95 mask to water the garden and make a quick trip to the store - my eyes are still smarting a couple hours later. On the weekend we were told things would get better with some showers on Monday, but they never materialized. Now they're telling us it'll be Thursday or Friday before we get some significant (but not complete) clearing. I hope they're right this time - a lot of people are starting to lose hope.

Be sure to have a bypass on your rain system to flush the smoke precipitates off your roof before they get into the tank. My parents water used to taste of tar over winter when they were lighting their fire.

Good to note! One thing I definitely want to do when I have the means is built a cabin/house with the latest and greatest efficiencies. Not in a hippy-earth-loving way, but more in a curious engineer way.

Did you know there are these things called Earthships in New Mexico? It's a bit too hippy for me, but on the right track.

I sense some hippie shame (maybe I'm wrong)! IMO a lot of that feeling stems from the government and ruling class pushing back against counter-culture. They were more right about the environment (among other issues) than they even realized at the time.

Earthships are unconventional in appearance and implementation, but are great examples of the type of thinking we're going to need to overcome imminent climate issues. If we started doing more of that in the 60s and 70s we'd be in a better position today.

No, no hippie shame at all. In fact, I suppose everyone has their own view on what a hippy is, and I should not have referred to it as "hippy" to begin with. It's too generic and yet personal, and doesn't quite describe anything specifically applicable to this case. my bad!

No worries... I always react to this because I see a lot of people online parroting an "no really, I'm not a hippie" attitude without thinking about the origin of that feeling!

We have that regulatory capture of building and zoning in the USA so that even if you wanted to just go and build an earthship it would be technically illegal.

If they can’t tax it or control it = not happening.

I use these guys to have them shipped. Comes in a few days, but this is going to last a while https://www.secondnature.com/

Smart idea. Whatever filters I picked up come with a little bluetooth chip on them and require an account with the manufacturer to get air quality information. I didn't bother for privacy reasons, but judging by 40k reviews on Apple Store, there are plenty of people who are subscribed to their air filter delivery. It makes a lot of sense.

I realize that air filters are the perfect candidate for a subscription service... but it's just insane the that every product in existence has a business prepared to ship some of it to you monthly.

Even with filters, it annoys me from an environmental perspective that the default flow leads you into having them ship you the exact number of filters your house needs, every two months.

Do filters have a shelf life? If not, or if it's sufficiently long, I'd rather they just send me six filters once a year, instead of one every two months, or something like that. I get that some people might not have enough storage space to pre-order like that, but it's otherwise completely unnecessary to send one at a time.

(The only plus I can think of to the one-at-a-time model is that getting a new one in the mail is a nice reminder to replace the filter. But I also have this thing called a "calendar" that I can use.)

You can totally do the six filters once a year, that's how I usually do it, but the smoke is destroying filters pretty quickly. If you want minimal brain power, getting them every 3-months (or what your normal cycle is) is fairly optimal, since getting new filter === time to change the filter.

I keep extra filters in the garage for about 6 months before they rotate into use. I'm not sure if they have a shelf life or not but we've never noticed any difference and neither have our indoor air sensors.

As long as the markets value ARR at a 3-10x multiple, subscription businesses will continue to appear :)

It's not super easy to be in the filters subscription business. People have odd size filters (I'm one of them, it's 1" shorter than the standard size), so it's a bit labor intensive. This is the sort of thing you should really be able to subscribe to when you get your furnace.

I happened to be at Home Depot the day after the skies turned gray with ash. I noticed a ton of people down one aisle and wondered what was going on. It turned out to be the Air Filter aisle. Oh right. I was able to grab the very last air filter for my furnace size. Everything else was cleaned out.

For air filters, try McMaster-Carr. They generally sell to businesses but ship to home addresses as well.

That's actually a fantastic reminder - get commercial things when it comes to high quality products - they definitely don't come to mind at first, but it's the same for many things, from appliances to boats. Commercial grade is meant to last way more than over the counter consumer goods!

> It's a good time to ponder what the real estate and living of the future could look like!

Move to Europe :) We don’t have crazy fires, high risk of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes. That’s becoming a compelling argument!

This blog post went up on Saturday, September 12. It says:

>> MUCH cleaner air will push in by 4 PM Sunday over the coastal zone and will just reach Seattle late in the afternoon

>> By 1 AM Monday, air quality will be hugely better in western Washington

As of now (Tuesday) there is no sign of clearing. Here in Seattle we are still in the "very unhealthy" range for AQI.

He posted updates yesterday and today explaining why the models were wrong, it’s a very interesting insight into some of the complexities of the problem and how many variables are involved:

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/much-more-pessimistic... https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/why-smoke-situation-i...

Basically, no good news till at least tomorrow:

>> So I am not optimistic for improvement either today or Wednesday. With smoke production (at a lower level) by the continuing fires, a "stuck" weather pattern, and smoke trapped in a relatively stable lower atmosphere, things just can't improve rapidly.

We’re in the Willamette valley and originally the smoke was supposed to let up last Thursday. That quickly passed and then it was Saturday night. Instead, we got dense, stagnant fog and continued off-the-charts air quality index numbers. But all the while, talk of how the rain was coming today. Well, not looking like rain today.

This has been a slog. Yet only a few towns over, there has been utter devastation from the fires. So we’re incredibly fortunate.

The headaches and scratchy throat have been pretty non-stop but mainly it’s the kids that have me concerned — the indoor air quality isn’t great, but have doing my best to keep the air from getting too bad. (Furnace filter / air purifier / taping the windows / etc).

Yeah, the weather forecasts for air quality have been quite inaccurate. Since Friday, the projections for Oakland CA have constantly been, “it’ll clear up in the next 24 hours.” Only now, Tuesday morning, has the AQI dropped below 100.

It seems like it’s just a harder problem than regular weather forecasting. Nobody has much experience with giant smoke clouds like this one. So I can forgive the weather service some inaccuracy. Just don’t rely on the AQI forecasts for much.

Yep. Predictions are obviously hard, but there's no wind to blow the smoke away, so I don't know why it is routinely predicted to do so 48 hours in the future. There is enough smoke piled up over the ocean (at least to judge from the satellite pictures) that it would take several days of steady winds to clear everything out. Any wind strong enough to theoretically clear the smoke quickly would probably spark new fires instead. And yet even with multiple fires nowhere near containment, the Spare The Air forecast still says "moderate" air in two days. I'll believe it when I breathe it.

The "incident meteorologist" for the North Complex fire was quoted yesterday as saying there was no system predicted that would cause a notable improvement in air quality for the next two weeks. Again, assuming no new fires, which is a stretch given that we're right in the middle of the traditional fire season.

The only forecast I rely on is the National Weather Service. Their site is painfully dated but the accuracy is unmatched.

I've found the HRRR experimental smoke models to be quite good. It's a bit cumbersome to use, but good enough for 18H forecasts

https://rapidrefresh.noaa.gov/hrrr/HRRRsmoke/

In my experience these have been completely wrong recently for my neck of the woods (PDX) even at 6-12 hours. Cliff explains in one of his posts that this is because of not modeling the inversion. I’m having better luck with the Copernicus CAMS forecast in Windy

I'm seeing some improvement in Redmond as of 3pm. I can see more distant hilltops than yesterday, sky feels slightly more blue, and looking directly at the sun hurts the eyes more than yesterday. Still extremely smoky don't get me wrong. Looking at the NWS forecasts they mention smoke going forward until Thursday night when we may get a thunderstorm.

How appropriate, a blog post about weather forecasts being inaccurate is itself inaccurate. Same down here in the Willamette Valley, I'd like to be able to breathe again.

I was in Delhi in January/February a couple years ago and the air quality index looked the same as the image from the article around Salem, OR every day I was there. Some nights I’d check the stats and it’d be around 600. The depressing thing is you end up getting sort of used to it, albeit with a bad cough.

The effects of our reckless destruction of the environment are sadly in your face every day in many parts of the world.

I have a utility that automatically sets my desktop picture to a snapshot from the GOES satellite image feed every 20 minutes or so, and this morning I noticed it showing this [0]. I was curious to see if it was what I thought, so I switched to the west-coast feed [1], and indeed, the smoke appears to have crossed the entire continent on the jet stream.

No apparent effects here on the east coast for now, but I'm betting sunsets will be prettier than normal for a while...definitely somewhat concerned for the possibility that it could worsen, though, if the fires continue.

(Images come from here [2], swap the 16 in the URL for 17 for the west coast feed)

[0] https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/2020...

[1] https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES17/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/2020...

[2] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16

I’m in the midsts of this right now and it’s depressing. I spent yesterday morning with a sore throat and itchy eyes and most of the afternoon hopelessly driving hours away for a box fan and furnace filter (I finally found them). All the while I should have been working. Some of my coworkers have complained of week-long headaches. If anyone else is suffering from this: you are not alone.

Willamette Valley here, and I feel you. Was really investing a lot of my optimism in the rain that was talked about for today, for over a week now — which doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen. This has been a long, long week.

Here in Bend it's pretty awful too. We live here because we love the outdoors, and we've been locked up inside since Friday. The kids are going stir crazy. Everyone was getting excited when the AQI dipped a bit under 200 yesterday (still rated "unhealthy") because we had been over 500. Now it's back up though, and they're talking about maybe things getting better by Thursday.

When I stepped out of my house last night and saw clouds and a little bit of blue I was ridiculously happy. None of the predicted wind or rain has shown up so far, I wonder if the fires are blocking the normal wind from the ocean.

Dark Sky has been promising a very good chance of light rain on Friday, it’s all that’s keeping me going...

I’m trying to forget that it says 0.01”.

Damn. That's like a glass of water being dumped on a driveway...

Also Willammette Valley. I was excited to look up this morning, and be able to both tell where the sun was, and see the outline of clouds through the smoke. Its been a week now.

Still horrible outside, but definitely improved.

Vashon Island. I heard some rain last night and was excited to see if the smoke had lifted when I woke up. But was very disappointed to see that it hasn’t. I’ve been indoors since Friday.

There's no good timing for these fires but now just seems really bad. Can't socialize inside because of Covid, can't socialize outdoors because of smoke. Tough time to be in the West Coast.

And as someone in the PNW these last few weeks were going to be our last hurrah of nice warm weather before the long gray winter too.

That part, to me, is the least frustrating. I'm rather tired of having hot indoors because the PNW doesn't have air conditioning as standard in most of the apartments...

It hasn't gone under 81 in my apartment since this whole smoke started; and my office tends to sit at 83 on the ground.

> the PNW doesn't have air conditioning as standard in most of the apartments

That's because it wasn't necessary until the last 10 years or so. 90 degree days were uncommon and night temps would dip low enough to cool most places in the evening through the next morning.

It's still not really. We had 2 days over 90 in seattle, one in the smoke. And a few days at 88-89, in total I had 4 days where I turned on the window unit in my home office. If I wasnt on a deep coding problem I'd be out in the yard. 4 days a year isn't really justification for aircon

If you live by a busy/noisy street as many apartments are, it's necessary. I grew up in the PNW in the suburbs and living more in the city in apartments the need for AC is much more real.

My apartment hit a high of 91 on Friday. The current temperature of 84 feels absolutely livable in comparison.

At least I have an air purifier...

I'm not looking forward to this winter. The pandemic so far has been bearable for me because I can go outside and work in the yard and enjoy the nice weather.

I plan on working super hard this winter to be cool about the rain and still enjoy the outdoors up here no matter how wet or miserable it might feel.

(Please don't take this as making light of the situation in the PNW. I realize it's awful and don't wish it on anyone.)

I can think of one, small silver lining to these fires:

I recently read that Asian giant hornets had recently been found in the PNW, and if they weren't wiped out in a few years they'd become permanently entrenched. I find that prospect absolutely terrifying, so perhaps we'll get lucky and these fires will wipe them out.

More likely, these fires will divert resources away from eradicating them.

Highly unlikely. Afaik there haven't been fires where the hornets have been. Plus, these things came across the damn ocean somehow. They are more than capable of flying away to escape a fire.

My young kids were going to finally go back to (outdoors) school today, but it had to be canceled due to the smoke.

Why not order a few HEPA filter air purifiers?

I have 4 (5th is on its way).

They work extremely well and if you pair them with a Temptop AQI sensor you can see how well in real time: https://www.temtopus.com/collections/temtopus-pm2-5-pm10-mon...

Those temptop sensors are great. I've previously had awair, foobot, and purple sensors which all sucked in different ways.

Really long thread about this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AirQuality/comments/ikf1ed/are_ther...

> Why not order a few HEPA filter air purifiers?

Everyone keeps saying this when they have been all sold out for the past 10 days.

I refuse to believe that all air filtering fans on Amazon are sold out, especially considering their extreme popularity in countries all over Asia. And even if we assume that’s the case for the sake of argument, you can still buy N95 particle masks of many different brands which will protect you well from particles in the air. They also mostly protect you from viruses. There was a pretty massive supply shortage of them this spring at the start of the pandemic but I doubt they’re extremely difficult to get a hold of today, I have five in my kitchen that I bought online for about a dollar each.

Looking at the current Amazon search results for “air purifier”: first one doesn’t ship to California, second is out of stock, third one is ridiculously expensive ($800!) and been shown to have a questionable effectiveness, fourth one can only cover a small room (and won’t arrive until next week), fifth and sixth ones are out of stock.

Also most people don’t enjoy wearing an N95 mask for a long time. Imagine wearing one for 8 hours while trying to sleep because you haven’t been able to get a filter. You can try to close every window and door and such in your house, but no one’s insulation is perfect and the air will get bad after a few hours.

If people don’t “enjoy” wearing particle masks they are free to breathe smoke and filter the indoor air with their lungs instead. I have worn one for eight hours many times when walking around cities with awful AQI scores and by far the most annoying thing about it is the condensation. You also don’t need “perfect” insulation for there to be a benefit to filtering indoor air, the simple fact that it moves around less means that it will clean up in a way outdoor air can’t. The “air purifiers” you can buy with filters built in are easy to use but at the end of the day they’re nothing more than a fan and a filter with air being forced through it.

And as a final point, you seem to just fall back on the fact that there are shortages as an indication that there’s nothing to be done, and this will soon be “over” anyway. First of all, you don’t know that, and secondly, if you live in an area where this is happening, it will happen again sooner or later. If you have nothing at home to help you filter the air you’re breathing, at least prepare for next time. Disposable particle masks are not a waste of money, they’re cheap and last forever.

Is that true that the smoke will get in after a few hours? Over the last few days, as soon as I step outside, I can smell the smoke out there really bad. I thought for sure that if it was smokey in the house, my nose would be used to the smell. I mean, I can see some particles getting into the house, but it has to be far better indoors doesn't it?

Certainly yes, it's better indoors. However long it'll take will depend on how good your insulation is (a lot of older construction in the Bay Area has really poor insulation; after all, we don't have to deal with harsh winters). That said, when it gets really bad outside (AQI >150) for over a few days, it's almost certainly going to get bad inside if you don't have any filtration.

One thing worth mentioning though is that the smoke you smell is volatile organic compounds, and the smoke you see is (I believe) PM10. You're not going to smell or see PM2.5, which is what these HEPA air purifiers are designed to filter. I'm not confident in this, but my intuition is that these smaller PM2.5 particles will find their way into your home more more quickly than the larger PM10 particles will.

At least in the Portland area, everything from Amazon is at least a four day delivery estimate. Not that things are sold out (they are in brick&mortar stores, for sure), but the distribution chain is unable to keep up, with people out sick, having evacuated, or even unable to drive as far as fast in the low visibility.

Amazon has officially stopped delivery in Portland due to the air quality. It's a hazardous work environment for their delivery workers.

Sold out until this Friday when this is all supposed to be over, unless it's a very weak filter that won't do anything for smoke. Show me where you can get genuine N95 masks (as a non-essential worker) as well please. There are tons of counterfeit masks going around.

Buy it anyway - the fires aren’t going away and the filters are still useful in the absence of smoke.

Masks: https://pksafety.com/3m-7500-series-half-facepiece-respirato...

Filter: https://pksafety.com/3m-2071-p95-particulate-mask-filter-pai...

It’s not my job to help you find N95 masks, they’re available from most hardware stores and definitely from Amazon. I just looked and there’s at least one type available on Amazon that’s not 3M in addition to full respirator masks and everything in between, and it’s easy to find other stores through Google that sell 3M disposable masks if that happens to be the only one you trust.

In addition to that, loose particle filters as spare parts are not uncommon and you can literally strap any filter on a fan, close your windows and start forcing indoor air through it to improve the ambient air quality.

I popped into Home Depot last Thursday and there were stacks of furnace filters and box fans available. Lowes and Ace Hardware websites show availability as well. Head down and take a look, YMMV in your area.

This isn't a nationwide shortage. Everyone in Seattle has been calling every Home Depot, Lowe's, and they've been sold out for a while. My local one in Bellevue was cleared out of all filters on Sunday, not even just the FPR10's. Ace's seems to be the most annoying. It lists a bunch of HEPA filters, then the product pages shows all of them are unavailable for pickup.

I have some on the way but they won't arrive until the end of the week. I wanted relief yesterday so I drove around to get it.

> Temptop AQI sensor

Went to that link. Tried to order. Glad i read the small text carefully:

"Ships within 28 Business Days"

Yeah...

wow, the temtop website sent my laptop fans spinning with all the crap it tries to load, and that my content blockers went into overdrive blocking (especially, and inexplicably, from reviewsimportify.com).

still, i'm interested in getting a good pm2.5 monitor to pair with my air purifier, as air pollution is a much bigger issue than covid (air pollution certainly affects vast swaths of people across the world, persistently and largely invisibly, and is only getting worse over the decades).

is waiting for the wifi version (currently sold out) worth nearly twice the (sale) price of an m10?

The WiFi versions have negative value to me, the apps are usually terrible and they are almost impossible to pair (typically only have 2.4ghz radios).

I went with the P10 which does exactly what I want (AQI and PM2.5). It looks nice, it works, and is highly visible from a distance (even has a 6hr battery which makes it easy to move between rooms).

The only other one I'd consider is the one that does CO2.

As a bonus the Temtop sensors are less than half the price of their competitors while being at least twice as good.

i guess i should have been more specific with my non-wifi version questions:

* is there a way to view sensor data historically and arbitrarily, preferably off device?

* is there a way to use it to control other devices (possibly via a home automation gateway) like my air purifier?

i see that it can be plugged in for power, but also has a battery, which is a nice feature. does that also allow for data transfer?

It doesn't do any of those things, it just senses AQI, PM 2.5 and puts it on the screen.

My experience with the devices that attempt to do the things you want is that they suck.

They do each of those things poorly and their basic detection functionality (most important feature) is also bad. (The reddit thread I linked to has details).

If a device existed that did those things and was actually good I'd recommend it.

As it is, everything in the market is awful.

At least these Temtops have the basic functionality down and do that part really well.

If you can do some really basic soldering then any i2c capable board (like raspberry) + PMSA003I + ccs811 and influx+grafana or something to dump the data into shoule give you the monitoring+archive solution.

Now just put your laptop inside of a HEPA vacuum bag. Problem solved.

Because, depending on where you are, they are all sold out.

I worry about the consequences of prolonged exposure. There is historical precedent that shows we should be concerned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London

Coal smoke in that case, not wood smoke. Coal is a terrible pollutant. If you survive the wood smoke, the literature suggests you'll be back to normal in a couple weeks.

Source? What makes combustion particulates from coal substantially worse than combustion particulates from wood?

Wood is made of complex carbohydrates (lignins). The worst thing you’ll get in the smoke is carbon particles and maybe a small amount of aromatic hydrocarbons like benzene.

Coal is made of up of a mixture of aromatic hydrocarbons like a anthracene, naphthalene. These are already toxic to humans. Add metals like mercury, antimony, etc.

Coal smoke is much worse than wood smoke.

Sulfur is a big one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

Leading to, for example, acid rain.

Also just a guess, coal is a finer particulate matter than wood, I think that might give more particles off. Wood dust, nope, coal dust? Hell no. Also radioactive!

Coal can have radioactive materials inside of it. There's radioactive carbon (c14) and it looks like also a bunch of more concerning materials.

[] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-....

Regarding carbon-14, there is so little of it that it makes no sense to even think about it (about 1 in 10^12 atoms). In addition, all biological matter (including you and the food you eat) has carbon-14 present in it -- that's the basic principle behind carbon dating. In fact, ash from wood burning would probably have more carbon-14 if anything.

But yes, the article you linked talks about trace amounts of uranium and other materials that actually could be harmful.

The half life of C-14 is much shorter than geologic formation time for coal. Coal's radioactivity is due to primordial nuclides and their decay chains.

How does the radioactivity from coal compare with the radioactivity from bananas?

> Source?

This one is easy to research. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, just being helpful.

Spreading dangerous misinformation is not helpful, and you are trying to convince them of something- namely that this air pollution is no big deal.

PM2.5 pollution, even at levels far lower than being seen now, is associated with literally hundreds of negative outcomes- lower IQ, worse test scores in standardized tests, more depression, worse ADHD, more asthma, more cancers (of both the lungs and other body parts), emphysema, as well as a whole host of issues related to full-body inflammation (ranging from auto-immune disorders to digestive problems).

I didn't say, "No big deal." I am aware of the danger. Thus, "if you survive."

The issues you're describing are studied after what I'd say is long term exposure. So far it's less than a week. A person with healthy lungs and no related problems will be back to normal if this ceases in a relatively short time. Of course, that doesn't mean we should relax about smoke season becoming a month-long annual event.

They say dosage makes the poison, but duration is important, too.

I would make the educated guess that the reason wood smoke is OK is because we have thousands of years of evolution to be more tolerant of wood smoke.

You would hope, but no. Wood smoke is still deadly.[0]

[0]https://www.stoveteam.org/why-stoves

“more tolerant” is what I said. Evolution is mostly a slow process and can never reach perfection.

An evolutionary force that is too strong just kills a species.

Close to a million years by the best guess.

Which is thousands of years... about a thousand such thousands.

Doesn’t coal burn more cleanly than wood?

Edit: I was probably thinking of smokeless coal which is processed to burn more cleanly.

It depends on the grade of coal. If you're burning anthracite, yes. If you're burning lignite... no.

It's not the wood I'm worried about, it's all the non-organic material in the smoke. Plastic, household chemicals, paint, etc... In some years we'll see a massive spike in cancer and respiratory issues from these fires.

I doubt there is a significant enough amount of those materials being burned. Millions of acres of forest has burned compared to relatively few buildings.

Rightly so. Smoke inside the house is a leading cause of death. [0]

[0]https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-a...

Would be interesting to know the AQI numbers for London back in the day.

I can see how it may be too late for that...

That smog was mostly caused by coal and highly localized.

Inhaling smoke is bad for your health, absolutely, but I fail to see many similarities between the two situations.

I’ve been using an app that converts AQI to equivalent cigarettes smoked per day. It’s not perfect but it’s something I can wrap my head around as a meaningfully bad number.

These apps really put this into perspective for someone who used to smoke a pack a day 15 years ago :) So I guess spending all day outdoors is not THAT bad?

Here's one such app, for people that are interested: https://shootismoke.app

It's currently giving me 2.3 cigarettes per day, and I live a decent distance away from any of the fires (Sacramento, CA).

Why in the world would this be a native app and not a web page?

Data collection, of course.

Or maybe the developer only knows mobile engineering? Not everything has to be seen from an uncharitable angle.

iOS encourages developers to make apps for their services because Safari's features and compatibility lag behind other browsers, and it doesn't implement PWA functionality.

And one of these "features" is arithmetic and displaying a number?

And what a strange name. Why is “shoot” treated like an expletive? I’m actually not even sure I’m parsing the name correctly.

Shoot! is a common substitute for other, more abrasive expletives (Shit! Fuck!). I'd much rather have the former in a business/service name!

Interestingly, the Android package name is indeed com.shitismoke.app

Right, but the point of using it is not to have to blank it out in form like this brand does. It would be like putting heck as hk.

The latest update it is giving me is 5 months ago (I'm in San Diego, CA), that seems hardly relevant.

I'd really rather not download a whole app for this so my apologies if this answer is readily available in the app, but...

I keep seeing these kinds of conversions (AQI to equivalent cigarettes per day) but I never see numbers on how long you need to be outside for that to be the case. Is it based on assuming someone on the coast (where AC is rare) having to keep their windows open all day? Is it based on 1-2 trips outside per day? How does it incorporate exposure time into the conversion rate?

I presumed it was 24h of outdoor exposure (aka camping), and based on the founder's response on ProductHunt[0] that seems to be the case.

[0] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sh-t-i-smoke

What sort of numbers are you seeing?

Yesterday it said 6 cigarettes in East Bay for AQI ~175

And you don't even get the nicotine kick.

I wonder how much all that cost, all in all, and how that compare to switching to non-carbon energy sources (to limit further climate damages)…

Non-carbon energy sources will not stop fires. Many of the ecosystems in California have depended on the fires as part of their life-cycle.

We screwed up over-preventing fires during the last 100 years and built up a huge tinder box.

Same here in central Oregon, it's very bad and literally no viz. I almost can't see past my neighbor's house...

Yeesh. I'm sorry. I'm in CO and even the levels here get me all of the symptoms you mentioned. Last week I drove 1700 miles and only escaped the smoke during a summertime snowfall. It rebounded and while driving I was suppressing a mild anxiety attack bc there's nothing you can do to escape it.

Driving at sunrise/sunset reminds me of the original Mad Max. Expect real and depressing.

Do you mind giving your state? I'm on the east coast so I don't expect to have any problems like anyone in Idaho or on the West Coast.

Lots of east coast pictures in this Twitter thread showing dimmed sun this morning: https://twitter.com/growingwisdom/status/1305821237587910657

Even thought some smoke has reached the east coast for pretty much everything east of the Mississippi there is no change in air quality (yet?)

Most, if not all, of the smoke traveling that far will be up near the jet stream level of the atmosphere. It will impact your sunlight but will have little to no effect at ground level.

Philadelphia-area highs came in about 7°F under forecast today due to the high smoke from the West Coast.

I'm in Portland, Oregon and can report the same.

I wonder how much of an effect this will have on crop yields and crop quality? I expect we'll see lower yields and less carbohydrate content. Also, what is the composition of the particles emitted by the fires? Is it mostly carbon or is there some potassium hydroxide? Is that fertilizing to any degree?

Diffuse light has a tendency to increase yield by decreasing the shading effect on lower leaves, so it largely cancels out. It is also fairly easily to saturate photosites in full sun. Heat/water are more limiting in these contexts.

It's really not an issue.

Carbohydrate content of crops has generally been going up with all that CO2 in the air, so maybe a bit less photosynthesis will do well for the nutritional content?

Genuine question, are these fires big enough to stop them from happening for a while? Or should we expect another one next year?

Edit: My original question was more in mind with does this have same effect as controlled burning / prescribed burning. Thank you all for replies :)

In % of land area burned, the fires are pretty small. Far less than 1% of the US land area burned this year.

So, given the same weather conditions, you should expect more fires next year.

That isn’t the statistic I would expect to be pulled out here. Not all land area has any chance of catching/spreading a fire. Fires don’t really spread through rainforest; they definitely don’t spread through rocky areas; nor, really, through swampland; nor across mountain ranges; nor through irrigated cropland. (Nor through modern concrete cities, but city land-area is negligible.)

There’s definitely some portion of the US land mass that’s covered in either dry brush, dry underbrush, or dry grass. But that portion is pretty small, I would think. It could actually be that a fairly large portion of “potentially burnable” land-area catches fire each year. (That doesn’t imply anything about there being any less of it for next year, though; it recovers!)

This propublica story has a lot of detail on the fires. They estimate that there are ~20 million acres overdue for burn and the fires this year are burning about a million acres. If I understood it correctly a million acres burning a year is about what's required for stasis, but the 20 million acre backlog will need to be burned too.

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...

At this point over 3 million acres [1] have burned in CA alone. So, seems like some of the 20 million acre backlog is getting burned through this year.

1: https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/

I read it as less than 1% of all land that has burned this year. Not 1% of all land in the US. Can you imagine if 1% of the entire of the US burned!

There are 1.9 billion acres in the contiguous US, making 1% about 19 million acres.

a bad wildfire year is ~10 million acres or ~0.5% (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF10244.pdf). It seems conceivable that we surpass that significantly this year.

Wow. Really puts it into perspective. That's equivalent to approx. the four smallest states all burned out.

> Fires don’t really spread through rainforest

The region in question is one of the largest temperate rainforests in the world.

Also, when these fires burn mature forests, they don't actually burn the huge trees, just the smaller brush. However, they are so hot that they kill the huge, mature trees. So a couple of years later, you have a huge amount of dead trees ready to burn again.

This description is painting with a wide brush across many different western tree species.

A douglasfir forest that burns is going to behave much differently than a late-successional hemlock one.

Why is that? Sap content? I just started reading Hoadley's "Understanding Wood" [0], which has gotten me interested in wood's characteristics.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1561583588/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

And to connect the dots, the smaller brush will return every year. So there's really no meaningful limit here; it can be this bad or worse every year to come.

Oh, I did not think nor knew about that one. I was more curious about does this have the same effect as controlled burning / prescribed burning but this seems to be making things even worse then. Thank you all for answers :)

Prescribed burning is usually done outside of the peak season (often in the later Autumn) just so it is more controllable and less intense.

It's amazing how fires can differ. Many "good" fires just essentially smolder for months, growing very slowly until the autumn precip douses them. The FS just lets them burn if they don't threaten any structures. I've even hiked directly over smoldering ground before, with no danger.

I'm not sure the US as a whole is the right comparison, since not all areas are equally prone to wildfires. Each of the West Coast states is above 1% of their land area burned, with California and Oregon pushing 3%.

Weren't these fires caused by a party?

This is a perfect illustration of how news and social media propagate false news while technically still being correct. The gender reveal party contributed to 8,600 acres on fire. However, >1 million acres were started by lightning[0], but get a lot less coverage unless you're in the affected areas. But the party gets more attention, because it's more interesting/easier to be outraged over that.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires#List...

I'd be interested to see an analysis trying to track down the exact lightning bolt that started a fire. 100% of lightning bolts are now mapped by various open source websites to a precision of hundreds of yards. That, combined with lucky satellite shots a few hours afterwards should be enough to confirm the fire started in the same place as the lightning bolt.

Using that, it should be possible to identify what percentage of fires were in fact started by humans who were never identified (due to there being no lightning bolt within a few hours of the fire starting)

I don’t think it’s an outrage thing, but it’s an interesting anecdote on how some of the fires started. Lightning and campfires seem to be the usual cause, so something totally different is novel.

I find the fact that people should be outraged over this incident ancillary. Hopefully these people owe tens of millions in restitution, as often seems to be the case. But, if the fire had started because of escaped monkeys starting fires, I think it would be equally as reported on because of the novelty, but sans outrage.

The “it’s reported on because it outrages/divides people” speculation is just lazy.

There are hundreds of fires across thousands of miles. So no. Many were caused by dry lightning and other natural phenomena.

Thank you that makes sense

one percent or more burns each year, the extent is being exaggerated for political purposes but you can view the numbers[0] for yourself. How many millions of acres burn each year is heavily under estimated by the general public because we only see hysteria when it does get reported. This in no way discounts the loss of life and property. Just saying, if a politician is talking then listen to someone else

Now do take care going into how history [1] plays into the numbers as shown on Cato's page because the larger numbers in the 30s and 40s were over disagreements in proscribed burns. Yet the years before that pissing match weren't exactly fun.

[0]https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html

[1]https://www.cato.org/blog/smokey-view-northwest

That depends on many factors. If the fires burned a significant portion of the places where fires are likely to start, say, forested hilltops which attract lightning or areas near where humans start fires, then it could slow things down for a few years.

It also depends on the fuel source. Grasses and certain vegetation can build up fuel loads in a year or two. Trees are obviously slower.

The fires really didn't burn much total land though, so it's very likely we can see big fires next year. We regularly get fires all over the west, this is just a bad year.

It's very unlikely to be a one-time event, the effects are going to be seen for a long time. Even a big forest fire is not so big that it significantly changes the forest stock remaining.

Feedback loop thinking helps. This is a situation that creates conditions for more forest fires.

Linear thinking, as an example, would be something like world heats up -> forest is on fire -> post-forest-fire world. Instead we are living in a world where every factor influences every other.

We had fires like this in Washington in 2018. 2019 was a small respite. But I expect this to be at least a biennial thing from now on.

In Oregon it is highly unlikely to recur at this scale and speed. This year was a very mild year for fires in Oregon. But, a freak wind event turned fires only a few acres large that had been burning for weeks into 100,000+ acre fires overnight.

As the decades roll on I imagine that as things get hotter and dryer one shouldn't bet on anything.

This is not scientific at all, just an observation that lets me hope for a clean 2021. I live outside Seattle, and the 2018 fire season was terrible (I have asthmatics in my family). We had some fire every year since I moved here in 2014. In 2019, we didn't have any smoke days all Summer/Fall. I like to tell myself next year will be better, but the other posters in this thread using, you know, numbers, are probably more right.

See https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911592361/are-recent-wildfire..., titled "Are Recent Wildfires Enough To Restore The Equilibrium With Fire?" The TLDR is no, this won't stop them from happening.

This article notes:

- In 2019, $160M was spent putting out wildfires in CA, but the economic damage was $80B

- 3M acres have burned in CA this year

- In order to manage wildfires appropriately in CA, 20M acres would need to be addressed (thinning or burning) every year.

- There are 48M acres of mountains, brush, and grassland in CA

Looking at maps of the fires can give a sense of what fraction has burned.

Here's the Cal Fire map for California: https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/

These fires are certainly large, but there's plenty more that can burn.

TLDR: Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

It really depends on observations that you could get once we are in after spring 2021. Like how much of the fire spreads and if there is a drought next year.

Weather occurs in cycles but with climate change we may have a new type of cycle which makes it really hard to understand or even model in general.

True, but OTOH CA will likely start to change it's forestry management practices as a result of this. The distribution of surface fuel is a joint effect of drought and policy/management.

Why do you say likely? I would have said that after the Camp Fire and I would have been wrong.

The less forest that there is left after the fire, the easier it is to clear the rest and replant with tree species that are better at holding onto water in drought conditions, and/or species that are hardier in the face of heat exposure.

Meanwhile, in Sao Paulo we are getting to 34C (93F) every day, and even the nights have been extremely warm. And here at the southern hemisphere it's winter now.

What are winters normally like? You seem to be about as far from the equator as places like Miami, so I'm not sure what to expect.

At São Paulo, it should be usual to have days where the maximum temperature is around 15°C, but most should reach high 20's. It should rain a lot of the time too, but with a small amount of water.

But hot and dry days are not unheard of, they are just unusual.

I'm sorry you guys are experiencing this. I hope that my question isn't foolish, but is it possible that the deforestation in the Amazon is partially causing the reduced rain?

I don't think so.

First, the forest covering of the Amazon didn't change that much on the last few years. Don't let international press fool you, the forest isn't "all burning down". It's burning down a lot, but not that much.

But more importantly, the rain on that region is mostly from oceanic and local humidity (São Paulo is in a forest area, with plenty of rivers).

It rains less there in La Niña years. I don't know how abnormal the situation really is. But the heat is way more unusual than low humidity.

Here in the Netherlands it is currently 32 degrees C.

This is the latest date we have had 30+ temperatures since measurements began in 1901.

And ten years from now we'll remember this as cool.

I remember visiting Amsterdam in a heatwave, maybe 2016, and they were hosing the canal bridges off to cool them so they'd close properly.

Apparently they'd expanded from the heat more than they were designed to cope with.

That happens in Seattle too. I'm surprised the metal expands that much myself.

The expansion is as a fraction of length. For steel its around 10-20ppm per degree C.

So a 40 degree temperature swing would be 400-800ppm, which means about 1mm difference in length for 2m of steel. Obviously bridges aren't usually made of a single span of steel, but there will be limits to how much expansion a given joint can tolerate, and each half of a draw-bridge needs to be fairly rigid. On top of that, 40 degrees is probably much less than the difference in road temperature between a cold night in January vs. a sunny day in August.

Railway tracks used to buckle in the heat before they built them with a small gap between the rail spans.

In September? Wow. It should be warming, with those crazy days you leave the house ready for 4 seasons. 34C is nuts.

Use room air purifiers with hepa quality, those remove particles down to <100 nm (these should be in every classroom already to capture SARS-CoV2 and make indoor air cleaner than outdoor air).

Furnace filters are not designed to filter as much, or else they would need changing too often and put too much pressure on the furnace motors when people forget, which is a hazard in its own right.

You can find furnace filters with higher ratings.

True, but they don’t keep the air clean nearly as fast as putting room air purifiers near people (closer to source) unless you have an HVAC that is so powerful you feel wind inside..

It's really not related to wind speed or hvac power. If you have a well insulated house then a normal hvac system can maintain positive pressure and keep the air inside clean. Assuming it's designed for that purpose.

Alternatively just having a bunch of box fans forcing air through filters is also good. That's essentially what a air purifier is.

How is positive pressure maintained? It seems like there would be continual loss of air to the environment that would have to be replaced. Ideally the replacement air would come through a filter, but at least in a central hvac system I don't think that happens. I suppose the new air coming in wouldn't be a big deal if the average air molecule doors a full cycle through the hvac many times before being lost again to the outside environment.

I love the box fan method, wish they would market that at menards for people doing drywall demo :)

Well insulated houses, unfortunately, are not a usual feature of West Coast architecture.

Wow, corona viruses are ~0.1um in size, maybe a bit bigger. HEPA filters of appropriate quality then should trap many of the viruses. Thanks for the heads up!

Even smaller stuff gets bounced around at that level via Brownian motion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

HEPA filters can catch really small stuff from this even if technically it could fit through.

Even more than that, because for the most part you're not filtering for viruses, but rather, aerosols: tiny mucus particles which contain the virus, but are themselves much larger, and also quite sticky.

True, if you must have an indoor gathering these days you should have a few HEPA filters scattered around. Nothing is 100% stop transmission but every little bit helps.

Would be curious to compare how much CO2 has been emitted as a result of these fires to California’s annual CO2 savings by going for renewable energy.

That might be interesting from a purely educational point of view but it is of little practical relevance.

Trees burning in wild fires release CO2 that was captured in the last couple of decades by the tree in the process of growing. Burning fossil fuels releases CO2 which was captured millennia ago and buried deep underground.

It's roughly the same as why melting icebergs cause sea levels to rise but rain will not.

It's of little relevance if the trees regrow. There are some signs these big fires may permanently damage the ecosystems in ways that prevent that.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/forests-wildfires-1.44449...

Prehistoric fires are believed to have been much larger than the current ones. In California for example, this year's historic 3.4 million acres fall below estimates for average fire area, although I don't know if California is just unusually fire-prone.

Sources/readings: https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi... https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/tmdl/re...

> Prehistoric fires are believed to have been much larger than the current ones.

Sure, but humans weren't a) burning a hundred million years worth of fossil fuels and b) siphoning off all the water in the area to grow almonds at that time.

Fire size in acres isn't the only variable, either; the article I linked states "The fire was so intense in some places that it burned up all organic matter needed to help the soil retain nutrients and moisture required for trees to grow."

I'm not sure how almonds came to be the go-to example of waste in California agriculture, but they're a bad one.

- Almonds can't be grown in most places, California is uniquely well-suited to it.

- California almond-growing practices are (much) more wasteful than they need to be. Israeli almond farmers can grow an almond with 1/20th the water used in California; the main innovation is irrigating into a three-foot-deep pipe, instead of spraying water on the surface, where most of it evaporates. Switching California's practices to match would be a relatively simple matter of insisting upon it.

- Almond farming uses an insignificant, single-digit amount of California's agricultural water budget. 45% of California water is splurged on alfalfa growing for fodder. Which can be grown anywhere, is a bad match for the climate and water resources, and is the place where any rational attempt to bring California agriculture into alignment with reality should begin.

So you're saying if we just calm down with the damn almonds we'll be fine?

It would help people understand the misguided policies that have been in effect, which prevent any meaningful reduction in fuel via cutting or burning -- policies meant to preserve the environment, but instead actually harm it.

"Preserving the environment" is rather a misdirection.

Initially, fire suppression's "10 a.m. rule" was the result of forest industry advocacy. More recent burn opposition comes from real-estate interests --- homeowners, but also banks, mortgage holders, and insurance companies --- seeking to preserve asset values. Periods are roughly the 1930s for the first and 1970s/80s onward for the latter.

Actual environmentalists (and many foresters) have advocated more though controlled and smaller burns for decades. I've travelled through the Western US numerous times over the past 30 years, and the role and scale of fire has long been evident. My trips have included travelling through recently-burnt landscapes, and several which burned within a few years of my passing through.

I had a long conversation with a forester on a road trip in the mid-aughts that was particularly memorable, and on which I've had frequent cause to reflect on since.

See, e.g.,

'Fire is medicine': the tribes burning California forests to save them (2019) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-pre...

Barriers and enablers for prescribed burns for wildfire management in California https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7

FYI melting iceberg do not cause sea levels to rise, but glacier do. An ice cube melting in your glass water do not rises the level.

Yes, fair point. I was speaking inexactly. I of course meant glaciers or perhaps icebergs which break off of glaciers.

I don't think that this is technically true, since icebergs are made from fresh water and they melt in the salt water of the ocean. Fresh water is less dense, so it will take up a larger volume than that of salt water.

Where does the additional density come from that wasn't there already when the iceberg was floating?

The amount of salt water displaced by the fresh water ice is equal to its weight, but the melted fresh water will take up a slightly larger volume than the displaced salt water. It is small, but calculable.

From what I remember reading, if all of the floating sea ice on the globe were to melt right now, sea levels would rise by about 5 centimeters.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

Yes you are right but this is not enough to have a meaningful impact.

the thermal expansion coefficient of liquid water explains the rise

That would be an effect of ocean warming. The melting itself occurs at a nearly constant temperature and is correlated with, but not causative of, the ocean warming.

But, perhaps you're trying to point out that the thermal expansion of the oceans has a greater impact on sea level rises than the correlated problem of glacier melting.

It could be relevant if a bunch of different wildfires happen around the same time worldwide. If they bring the global average temperature above some tipping point and result in the melting of permafrost and release of large amounts of methane, that could cause the runaway greenhouse effect to occur much earlier than previously forecast.

I'm afraid if that was the case the world is so delicately balanced that we are already fubar.

> we are already fubar

Nobody's shown any convincing evidence that this isn't the case. We've been tracking worse-than-worst-case-predictions for a while https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-...

Well it does matter in the sense of how bad policy can annihilate the benefits of good policy

Not to mention the fact that California is still emitting far more CO2 then it should in order to keep the climate disaster at bay.

Any comparison between current carbon savings and emissions of natural disaster would be an exercise in irrelevance.

> in the last couple of decades by the tree in the process of growing [...]

Isn't most biomass from trees that are centuries old?

Related: I've noticed here (California's central valley) that trees have started changing colors for fall already. This is pretty early: usually trees change in mid-October. I'm guessing this is from the smoke reducing light/temperatures.

On the day when the Bay Area was completely blacked out, the weather forecast said it would be 89, and when I went outside my thermometer was reading 68.

The cooling effect of smoke is ridiculous.

Yeah, we had several days in Seattle where the forecast was 70s and sunny yet it stayed 58F all day and night.

Seeing this first hand here near Eugene. Weather app has said mid 80s, I go outside and it's in the mid-low 60s and I need a hoodie.

Our local fire crews say this completely crappy weather/ unhealthy air is slowing the fire down so they can increase containment. Going stir crazy, but also this fire scared the hell out of most people so it's hard to complain too much about lingering fog/ chilly days.

If you're like me and you wondered if the fires raging on the west coast could benefit from the controlled burn approach Australia has historically used to control bushfires, the answer seems to be a disappointing no [1]. Any folks who know this better than me who can comment?

> He adds that a particular feature of the recent fires in Australia is that they have spread across the crown or top part of the forest - so removing growth at ground level does not make that much difference.

> Also the fires have been hot and intense enough to burn through areas that were already burned, with embers able to travel through the air and ignite areas far away from an active fire.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51020384

A couple months back, I read an article on how California's indigenous peoples used to do controlled burns to help prevent wildfires. Apparently it was something California put an end to, despite the indigenous folks' insistence. It seems to have begun making a comeback in recent years though [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-pre...

Conservation of energy indicates that you can ‘flatten the curve’ of forest fires by doing more burns more frequently that are less intense.

That's what I was under the impression of as well. What the article seems to imply, though, is that exogenous increase in burn intensity (ostensibly through climate change) is making the mileage of that approach less practical than it used to be. Of course, I'm sure the two are not mutually exclusive.

> the modeling systems on which they are based do not include smoke

Can anybody help with providing some links to content that would expand on this? It doesn’t have to be region/country specific, just looking to dig a bit deeper in a lore general sense about current models and future improvements.

I can take a guess and say that it wasn’t accounted for in current models as it might have been too niche a statistic to try and monitor, but either it’s becoming more of a factor now that’s having a prolonged (significant) effect on models or maybe there has just been a push to expand into those niches to make the models more adaptable in the future.

I drove from the Idaho panhandle to SF on Sunday. 1000 miles of abysmal air.

Most of the journey had reported 500+ AQI values, with some areas visibly much, much worse.

The worst was along the Columbia River gorge where the Deschutes flows into the Columbia (2nd photo in my tweet)

I'm not sensitive to poor air, and I was running my car on recirculated air, but at one point I actually started wearing my KN95 as I was driving.

https://twitter.com/reidconti/status/1305601474005590018?s=2...

> I drove from the Idaho panhandle to SF on Sunday

One does not simply walk into Mordor...

That's how its been in California the last few summers. Hot summer days, big fire(s), cooling of the summer heat under the deep cover of smoke.

my local forecasting should blame it on the smoke too, since they never get it right...you know when i know it's going to rain...when it's already raining.

Cliff Mass spoiled himself for me with this asinine blog post comparing Seattle BLM protesters to brownshirts in Nazi Germany [0]. It feels icky to get behind someone who will use his platform to sling ridiculous accusations and accept no criticism [1].

It's a shame - his weather reporting is uniquely good and fun to read.

[0] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/08/seattle-city-in-fear-...

[1] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/08/my-firing-at-knkx.htm...

EDIT: Fleshed out criticism of the original blog post:

http://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_8421ecd2-d90c-11ea-9e91-...

I agree that he went off the deep end with that post. Let there’s be no mistake about that; I live on cap hill in Seattle and his analogy falls flat on its face for many reasons.

But, I think we should allow ourselves the nuanced perspective of continuing to enjoy his weather posts even if we disagree with his politics.

I think that we owe it to ourselves to be able to pick and choose information from a person rather than writing them off entirely.

Isn’t that what we do with family members that we have disagreements with but still have to get along with? Are we not all one big human family?

Appreciate this perspective!

I feel like I'm indirectly supporting his politics by engaging with his weather content. I'm generating ad revenue as a reader. And I'm increasing the size of the platform he can claim, which he can leverage for books, speaking gigs, etc. to promote whatever views he deems important. It's easy for me to find another weather source.

You have a point there; a public platform is certainly different than an intra-family affair.

You’re right about the breadth of viewership being a potential problem. Many folks believe anything they read.

This is where I really hope that individual critical thinking will save us. Media outlets shouldn’t be sources where the consumer feels ok with believing everything they hear. I think if that were not the case deplatforming wouldn’t be as appealing of an option as it currently is for handling these situations.

Alas, I’m not confident that critical thinking is alive (much less well) when so many people apparently think along party lines.

Probably deplatforming Cliff was the right thing to do in the big picture.

I'm actively looking for better sources.

Honestly, one of my biggest problems with Cliff isn't even a new one ... his blog is almost wholly one-way.

He spent all this time to build a platform, but doesn't seem to care about his community at all. Doesn't respond to smart comments, nor dumb ones. Not on busy popular posts, nor quiet ones. Doesn't answer questions at all really.

Could you help me understand the reasons?

When you are living history, you don’t know that ww2 is around the corner. I think the observations of the similarities between the brown shirts and violent protesters is correct. I don’t know if a better historical parallel. Look what happened to Aaron Danielson.

Brown shirts engaged in antagonism and murder towards people they perceived as evil in the same way these Antifa types do.

They terrorized businesses the same way these BLM types have been doing.

I do not understand the perspective of people who don’t have a regexp that fires on this- I want to be wrong, but I can’t stop seeing problems.

I don't understand how these parallels can be so easily dismissed. Is it because you don’t expect it to end in a Holocaust?

Yes, it does remind us of how the brownshirts spread false rumors and hysteria about people who opposed the nazis in the years before the holocaust.

At least from my perspective this has been an ongoing problem for many years now and I would refer you to Godwin's law.

There is this weird sort of mystique about Hitler and the Nazi Party that keep people entranced that it was "pure evil" rather than a decade-plus political process taking place in a very unique time of history with many other actors in play. You can't use any sort of "slippery slope" argument because of course those don't exist. The fact that you can trace elements of both WW-I and WW-II to at least the mid-1800s in terms of holistic world upheaval doesn't even get mentioned. There doesn't seem to be many students of history these days.

Instead what we get is almost fantasy horror and when you try to make serious political arguments they are just dismissed. I mean, it can't happen here because unicorns don't exist either. I also find it troubling that many people have no appreciation for Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in light of the millions lives that were destroyed after WW-II. Some very horrific acts occurred in the 20th century and debating rather than dismissing these issues seems like not only a good idea, but probably essential if peace and humanity are truly desired.

If a family member compares blm to nazis then no I basically cut them off.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, are you advocating for continuing to follow a blog that is known to give misinformation because you like the writing style? Because if that is the case I would highly recommend changing your mind, the Bayesian prior has changed and unfortunately it is permanent.

Just because he gives misleading social commentary, doesn’t mean that his meteorological information is any less accurate.

How do you know his meteorological information is accurate?

He is a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and his resume [0] looks impressive to me. I realize that this is an appeal to authority, but since I don’t know enough about meteorology to make an informed decision about the specific information that he gives, his qualifications seem to indicate that he is a trustworthy source of meteorological information.

I did a quick internet search and looked him up on Wikipedia. His Wikipedia entry [1] mentions the controversies surrounding his non-professional views, but I didn’t find anything about his meteorological views being in question.

Please correct me if I missed something! It can be hard to determine if someone is trustworthy on the internet.

[0]: https://a.atmos.washington.edu/%7Ecliff/CliffsVitaeLatest090...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Mass

The writing style is OK, but I’m really there for the weather, and that’s it.

Heck I don’t even entirely agree with his weather assessments.

Rephrasing what someone wrote in an uncharitable way is a toxic form of communication that will limit your ability to experience diversity of perspective. It annoys everyone around you and will hurt you in the long run.

Instead of slapping malignant narratives on people, try asking explorative questions that invite the OP to clarify or make an ass of themselves.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't follow the aforementioned blogger and don't live on the west coast. That said, your response is interesting, how is my query toxic? To be honest, I don't even think I'm being uncharitable; if a previously reliable information source starting being unreliable then I would expect folks to pay attention to notice that and cease to use it as a source.

Since you have an opinion on this, what sort of questions should I have asked the OP?

To be explicit; I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious.

“are you advocating for continuing to follow a blog that is known to give misinformation because you like the writing style?”

If you look at op’s comment, there is no mention of style.

I also have no visibility into misinformation from the blogger. Not sure that OP does either.

With respect to his weather writing, he’s been around for quite a while and is perceived as authoritative. He had a radio show dedicated to the weather on NPR. This isn’t some rando with a blog.

Questions you should have asked: “how do you feel about this posting where he makes this claim that is clearly misinformation?”

You may be right about your above questions- but as an outsider looking at this thread, I don’t see why you believe the things you do and I don’t know why OP would ever agree to that phrasing. You assumed conflict rather than misunderstanding by asking ~“are you advocating reading misinformation because it’s well written?” Is a question that assumes someone knows your context.

Trying not to be adversarial here- just underlining where reasonable people would not be super thrilled with the questioning style.

I don't think it's reasonable to characterize political comparisons we find offensive as "misinformation". More generally, standards of intellectual engagement that require you to import political battles into every other topic are destructive and unhelpful.

I want to thank you for linking to the articles, even if you disagree with him.

Calling an observation "offensive" and punishing someone for making it, is not refuting it, or even addressing it. America's tradition has always valued free speech and open debate, and it seems many people on the left no longer value these things. I do find that chilling.

I read that article, and it doesn't seem like it's beyond the pale of civil discourse to me. Sounds like cancel culture run amok, which you are now a part of.

Cliff Mass is 100% right on comparing BLM protesters to brownshirts, and he was also specific in noting that he isn't describing all protesters. The relevant quote from his blog post is "Seattle's brownshirts have hidden within protest groups".

Those who say this is an inappropriate comparison are gaslighting, as these criminals have a consistent track record of engaging in violence, intimidation, threats, and more. Let's take a look at what this subset of BLM protesters have done in the Seattle area. They:

1. Harassed the mayor at her house, and issuing death threats like "guillotine Jenny" and writing misogynist messages like "Resign bitch" on her house and the road in front, and used similar tactics at the houses of council members: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/native-le...

2. Repeatedly blocking bridges and highways, snarling traffic for thousands of drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists even after their irresponsible highway blockades led to a death: https://www.kuow.org/stories/updates-protests-for-racial-jus...

3. Showed up at our black female police chief's neighborhood, started documenting who lives where, noted license plates, and interrogated neighborhood kids for information: https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/08/02/hundreds-of-blm-support...

4. Even showed up at the houses of council members who agreed to their demands, to intimidate them and make sure they wouldn't change their stance: https://westseattleblog.com/2020/08/protest-evening-march-in...

5. Used a homeless camp as a staging area for riots, storing weapons there: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/seattle-police-recover-wea...

6. Showed up at white people's homes, demanding that residents leave the neighborhood: https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/08/14/blm-marches-through-...

7. Made lists of businesses to destroy: https://thepostmillennial.com/antifa-rioters-made-lists-of-s...

How can you not see the valid comparison to brownshirts here? Damaging property, holding drivers hostage on the highway, obstructing others from accessing public infrastructure, committing arson, issuing death threats, and so forth all match the description perfectly. Remember, terrorism is defined as "the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes." (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/terrorism). The actions of local BLM activists and Antifa rioters completely fits this description.

And given the evidence is so clear, this attempt to cancel Cliff Mass, a distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at a major research university, is simply progressive cancel culture run amok.

Intellectually I understand the comparison (politically motivated destruction of businesses) but it's so tone deaf.

The scale and consequences of Nazi Brownshirts and Kristallnacht - 7k businesses destroyed, 30k Jewish men arrested, by a racist state that would eventually kill them - are incomparable to what's happening here in Seattle.

So if these incidences of harassment are evidence that BLM are "acting like brownshirts", prey tell to what should we compare the right wing groups that have spawned several fatal shooters?

That seems like whataboutism to me. What bearing does that have on the correctness of Cliff Mass's comparison of the subset of BLM protesters that engage in criminal activities and brownshirts?

It goes to show that Cliff Mass has completely lost his framework of reference in his comparison (and so have you).

As a German let me assure you that comparing riots among BLM protesters to the Kristallnacht is utterly unappropriate. Don't get me wrong - the rioters should be held accountable for their crimes.

You compare a local, loosely organised group of somewhat indiscriminate rioters to a nation-wide, highly hierarchical, para-military organisation that targets one specific ethnicity and went on to commit mass murder of said ethnicity on an unprecedented, industrial scale.

My feeling is that you are getting overly specific about requiring every detail to be an exact match for a similarity to hold. I don't think that is reasonable. Both the criminal subsets of BLM and the brownshirts created an atmosphere of fear. In Seattle, people are afraid to voice their political opinions freely, whether online or in social circles or at work or in political action or protests, because of the threat of these groups and their aggressive tactics. That is what makes this comparison valid, ultimately, since these actions constitute terrorism.

Some other responses to specific things you mentioned:

> loosely organised group

BLM is a nationwide (and global) organization with chapters in numerous cities across America. Protesters in different cities share tactics, chants, demands, etc with each other. Many cities even share the same exact participants. For example, some people from Seattle were arrested in Kenosha recently, as they were using their food truck "Riot Kitchen" as a cover for planned criminal activity (https://thepostmillennial.com/portlands-riot-kitchen-arreste...). Just because these groups have some degree of decentralization doesn't mean they are "local" or just "loosely organized", and it does not reduce the chilling effect they are having on political discourse.

> somewhat indiscriminate rioters

The various incidents I quoted in my earlier comment were highly-targeted, which is the opposite of indiscriminate.

> para-military organisation that targets one specific ethnicity and went on to commit mass murder of said ethnicity on an unprecedented, industrial scale

There is no mass murder from BLM. However, this was not the primary purpose of the brownshirts either. The regime that the brownshirts enabled was responsible for significant mass murder, but the brownshirts themselves are described in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung) as follows:

"Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies; disrupting the meetings of opposing parties; fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties [...]; and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews such as during the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses"

The parallels I am noting are things like providing protection for riots/criminal activity, disrupting opposing parties, and intimidation (of politicians, of private citizens, of businesses). My evidence is the long list of incidents I mentioned in my earlier comment. One of those incidents was even explicitly targeting an ethnicity. Another incident specifically carried misogynist tones. All of these incidents targeted people based on political views and created a sense of fear, so that those who harbor a different opinion are afraid to speak out. That is happening on an unprecedented, industrial scale, across virtually every city in the country.

> let me assure you that comparing riots among BLM protesters to the Kristallnacht is utterly unappropriate

Let's take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht. It characterizes the event as involving "Pogrom, looting, arson, mass arrests". The definition of pogrom is noted in its own Wikipedia article as "A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or expulsion of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews". I mentioned there have been incidents of mobs showing up at the homes of white citizens and demanding they leave - so that checks the "expulsion of an ethnic group" part. We obviously have also had violent riots, looting, and arson as well - there are tons of videos showing that. To my knowledge, city leadership did nothing to stop many of these incidents, by the way.

Seattle did not have the scale of Kristallnacht, nor the mass arrests/incarceration, nor the murder. I don't think Cliff Mass was claiming that, and I don't think readers interpreted his comparison that way either. But since Seattle has had many of the other elements, I felt the comparison was valid-enough to draw.

> Cliff Mass is 100% right on comparing BLM protesters to brownshirts...

Is he, though? Are those rioting actually comparable to brownshirts? Are they literally a paramilitary detachment of the government with a mandate to oppress certain classes of people? Or is this a case where Cliff immediately loses the debate under Godwin's law?

Could he have compared the rioters to activists in the Arab Spring? Or the French Revolution? Or the Black Panthers? They certainly fucked some shit up, didn't they? But no, he chose the Nazi party.

I see dozens of more-hyperbolic comparisons of political actions to Nazi Germany than this every week. Made by higher-profile people too. I’m surprised this one even rates on anyone’s radar.

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