Smoke From Canadian Wildfires Blankets the Upper Midwest
Smoke from wildfires raging across Canada continued to choke parts of the Upper Midwest on Tuesday, polluting the air for millions of residents and casting a hazy glow in the skies across several northern states.
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and parts of Nebraska and Michigan were under air quality alerts on Tuesday, with advisories for more vulnerable groups to stay indoors or limit long stretches of outdoor activity and monitor their health, according to the National Weather Service.
While smoke was blanketing the air in the upper Midwest, it also drifted into others areas, mainly in higher layers of the atmosphere, and covered at least a third of the United States.
Marc Chenard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center, said satellite imagery showed smoke stretched from the Dakotas, across the Midwest, into the Ohio Valley and as far north as New York and as far south as north Florida on the East Coast.
'A lot of the smoke is aloft in the atmosphere, so you're not seeing visibility or air quality issues at the surface,' he said.
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources issued an air quality alert on Tuesday for all of Iowa through 6 a.m. on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service, with levels considered unhealthy for sensitive groups and possibly even for healthy individuals expected over the next few days. Residents were advised to limit outdoor activity until the air quality improved.
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