While southern Ontario is getting a break from thick wildfire smoke, experts warn that could quickly change. The Air Quality Health Index climbed in mid-July as a yellow haze settled over parts of the province. Smoke blew in from raging wildfires further north, prompting health concerns and forcing some event organizers to cancel their plans. “Unfortunately, we are seeing longer wildfire seasons. We’re also seeing areas that usually are not impacted by wildfires [become] highly impacted by wildfires,” Glory Dolphin Hammes, CEO of IQAir’s North America division, said. “This is something that is in terms of trend, permanently changing.” The Switzerland-based company makes and sells air purifiers and monitors. As the company grew, they created a network of data to help monitor air quality around the world. Anyone with one of their monitors can provide information to the network as part of the effort. “[We] really, truly try to give people hyper-local data, so, that’s the station that’s closest to them, because when you’re modeling data, there’s very wide variances and it’s not actually as accurate. We want people to have the most accurate information to make informed choices,” Dolphin Hammes said. When smoke begins to spread, it can become an international issue. “Last year, we were able to detect how the Canadian wildfires were actually spreading throughout parts of southern Europe. So that gives you a good idea, in terms of geography, how far it can actually spread,” Dolphin Hammes said. Communities are largely at the whims of Mother Nature once the wind starts to blow. “What can tend to happen is if there’s a lot of wind shear in the atmosphere, changes of wind speed and direction with height that tends to disperse the smoke fairly quickly, unless it’s a very large fire,” Geoff Coulson, Environment Canada Warning Preparedness meteorologist, said. “If those winds do line up in a given direction from the surface to higher levels of the atmosphere, that can tend to create streamers of wildfire smoke that can travel for thousands of kilometers. And as we saw a few weeks ago, not only affecting air quality in southern Ontario from fires in northwestern Ontario, but also affecting the air quality of a number of communities in the northeastern U.S.” Keeping tabs on air quality Environment Canada uses several models to see the dispersion of smoke over time, including some American models. They can then forecast what the winds are going to do in the various levels of the atmosphere and get a sense of where the smoke is going to go. Coulson added Environment Canada also checks what third parties like IQAir are reporting to see if the data adds up so they can present the most accurate forecast to the public. “We’re using both the 38 monitoring sites provided provincially, but also IQAir, Purple Air and some other sites as well. Just to compare and contrast the readings, to see how they’ve got the smoke plumes moving with time and things of that nature. So, in this day and age, it can almost be information overload,” Coulson said. “The main provincial website sponsored by the ministry is airqualityontario.com. But in the partnership with Environment Canada, federally, we also have the quality information on each of the city pages on the weather.gc.ca website, as well as on the Weather Can app for individual locations. Most of them have an air quality link, and you can get the current conditions and the forecast conditions over the next couple of days, either from the provincial website or, again, through Environment Canada.” But as monitoring technology in North America improves, Dolphin Hammes said the data shows wildfire season is worsening, and suggested everyone should check local air quality levels throughout the day, especially during summer months. “There are 8 million people per year that die from air pollution. If you really think about it in that terms, there’s so much that we can do to help to save human health if we focus on the air quality,” Dolphin Hammes said. “That’s a global number and it’s direct correlation. So, it’s not just folks that may have had respiratory issues. It’s not folks with cardiac issues. It’s literally directly correlated to air pollution.”
