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The smoke clears
Sep. 19th, 2020 09:41 amPortland sits in a river valley with hills and mountains all around it, which means it's always had a tendency to trap pollution. An air quality alert or two is a pretty standard part of summer around here.
My suburb sits in the next valley to the west, which has a profile that isn't quite as prone to collecting pollutants. My area has spent a lot of the last week in the Hazardous section of the AQI scale, but it's had nothing like the off-the-scale readings that downtown Portland has seen.
After predictions of gradual clearing over last weekend, then possible rain on Monday, then maybe Tuesday, then admissions that the National Weather Service's models really don't know how to handle that much smoke, it was a moment of great excitement on Wednesday afternoon when our local AQI abruptly improved all the way to Unhealthy. But it went back up overnight, and it wasn't until a storm system started moving in late Thursday that the permanent improvements started.
It seem to have been less the rain itself scrubbing the smoke out of the air than clean air flooding the area that finally turned the corner. Yesterday, after the main front had moved through, the AQI kept dropping until we made it down to Good in the evening and I finally switched the AC out of recirculation mode.
Dumb homeowner confession: It wasn't until the local news started running articles about ways to minimize exposure to smoke that I even knew home HVAC systems had a mode for using only recirculated air. I hope I remember that come the next tree pollen season.
The storm seems to have done everything we were hoping it would. It came with lightning, but didn't cause any new fires; it swept the smoke away; and it helped calm down the existing ones, including the fire right on Portland's doorstep (on the other side of town from us, luckily) which was only 6% contained as of yesterday.
The long-term forecast says that's about it for the hot days of summer, but I can't say we're that sorry to see them go at this point.
My suburb sits in the next valley to the west, which has a profile that isn't quite as prone to collecting pollutants. My area has spent a lot of the last week in the Hazardous section of the AQI scale, but it's had nothing like the off-the-scale readings that downtown Portland has seen.
After predictions of gradual clearing over last weekend, then possible rain on Monday, then maybe Tuesday, then admissions that the National Weather Service's models really don't know how to handle that much smoke, it was a moment of great excitement on Wednesday afternoon when our local AQI abruptly improved all the way to Unhealthy. But it went back up overnight, and it wasn't until a storm system started moving in late Thursday that the permanent improvements started.
It seem to have been less the rain itself scrubbing the smoke out of the air than clean air flooding the area that finally turned the corner. Yesterday, after the main front had moved through, the AQI kept dropping until we made it down to Good in the evening and I finally switched the AC out of recirculation mode.
Dumb homeowner confession: It wasn't until the local news started running articles about ways to minimize exposure to smoke that I even knew home HVAC systems had a mode for using only recirculated air. I hope I remember that come the next tree pollen season.
The storm seems to have done everything we were hoping it would. It came with lightning, but didn't cause any new fires; it swept the smoke away; and it helped calm down the existing ones, including the fire right on Portland's doorstep (on the other side of town from us, luckily) which was only 6% contained as of yesterday.
The long-term forecast says that's about it for the hot days of summer, but I can't say we're that sorry to see them go at this point.
