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Comment by kulikalov | Hacker News Reader

Is it unusual? My first year here

It's pretty much unprecedented.

Unprecedented for the east coast. It's a reality we've been living with on the west coast for the last few years already.

This is the thickest, longest lasting, and furthest traveling wild fire smoke I've ever experienced. I Left the windows open to sleep and I woke up with a voice two octaves lower.

Was worse in SF a few years ago

To my research, SF AQI has never topped 249. New York just topped out at 342 today with no sign of letting up. I won't dispute that SF wildfire season being so frequent and long lasting, there's been nasty periods, but no it's factually incorrect that SF has ever been at one time worse than what's happening in NYC right now.

I'll admit - looked at the New York ones for today after making this comment and it looked higher than I had seen in SF. I was basing on what I had seen on purpleair yesterday.

e: Although I do remember a few days where I believe it might have broke 300 on purpleair

I double checked my chat messages from when this was happening in SF and it was definitely above 300 on purple air during the 2020 SF fires.

Checking my logs from the CZU Fire Complex back in 2020, the AQI at my house in the SF Peninsula topped out at 766. It was pretty bad.

one of the sensors in SF right now

""" On June 7th, 2023, 4:12:06 PM PDT 10 Minute Average US EPA PM2.5 AQI is now 320 Sensor: Bill Nye the AQI """ https://map.purpleair.com/1/m/i/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0?select=...

Uh, that's clearly an outlier. None of the other dozens of sensors around it are registering anything higher than 42.

Portland hit well over 500 in 2020, and I believe I remember some peak readings of around 800, but I can't find them now.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/09/portlands-air-qualit...

Here's the data for the Bay Area from 2020 - which was considered a particularly bad year for wildfire smoke, and is also the most recent year it's caused particular problems here. Peak levels were only around 200, although it was admittedly somewhat prolonged: https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-air-quality/current-air-quality...

I think this is maybe not directly comparable with purple air, was able to find old chat messages I had sent showing that the AQI in my neighborhood in SF was upwards of 300 on September 11th, 2020

Currently 480 in the area of Philly my parents live.

I believe we started suffering a long streak back in 2017 where it was back to back years of suffering. Last year we got off easy because we got hit by some lucky rains that put an end to things. Still gotta get through this summer and see how things go.

Pretty normal for California the past few years...

It has broken a 1981 record. Never been this bad. No that’s not normal.

Yes, quite unusual.

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