Our friends up in northern Maine have been getting a bit smokey lately, thanks to wildfires burning in far western Canada. Blowing all the way from British Columbia and Alberta, it's been choking us out all the way over on this side of our country, thousands of miles away. The smoke has been sucked up by the jet stream in upper levels of the atmosphere, and in northern Maine, you can smell it in the air and folks with breathing issues have been complaining about difficulty catching their breath.

The National Weather Service in Caribou put out this video that shows a satellite image of the smoke flowing over the northern section of the state. Check it out!

Until yesterday, it was mostly in the form of a just a haze in the sky, but now that it's been mixing more directly with our air flow, lots of folks have made several comments on the NWS Facebook page about seeing, and smelling, the smoke rolling through.

Folks with bad lung health may want to take a few extra precautions and limit the amount of outside work they have to do, or even stay inside altogether. It's hard to say when this will all subside in Canada. Some of these fires are over 6000 acres each! So definitely keep an eye on the air quality locally. Weather depending, it won't necessarily be like this every day, so there is some relief to be had.

If you want to know a bit more, feel free to keep and eye on the National Weather Service in Caribou's Facebook page. They update it often, and always have up to date information about air quality. In the meantime, try to breathe easy up there!

 

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