August 2022 Forecasts and Discussions

[Typeing3]

You think it will be humid again

Could be by south coast standards. The humidity last week hovered long along the upper echolons of what levels of humidity is possible around these parts. Highly unlikely we see that again with any future heat spikes this summer.

[AbbyJr]

Could be by south coast standards. The humidity last week hovered long along the upper echolons of what levels of humidity is possible around these parts. Highly unlikely we see that again with any future heat spikes this summer.

I'd be surprised if we see another heatwave this summer that compares with the one we had last week. While it was not as intense as the June 2021 heat storm, it was still a top tier event in my opinion. That said, I do think we will warm up again next weekend and into the following week. How hot is yet to be seen but the upper 20's-low 30's with the humidex in the low-mid 30's for a few days wouldn't surprise me.

[Weather101]

Could be by south coast standards. The humidity last week hovered long along the upper echolons of what levels of humidity is possible around these parts. Highly unlikely we see that again with any future heat spikes this summer.

I don't think I ever experienced that in my lifetime here tbh

[Typeing3]

12z GFS ensembles:

ens_image (12).png

12z ECMWF ensembles:

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12z GEM ensembles:

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[Weather101]

I'd be surprised if we see another heatwave this summer that compares with the one we had last week. While it was not as intense as the June 2021 heat storm, it was still a top tier event in my opinion. That said, I do think we will warm up again next weekend and into the following week. How hot is yet to be seen but the upper 20's-low 30's with the humidex in the low-mid 30's for a few days wouldn't surprise me.

This was worst then June 2021 imo, Just the duration and zero relief from the humidity made it so miserable. I'm strictly talking how I felt going outside.
You couldn't find relief going in the shade it was disgusting

[Rubus_Leucodermis]

This was worst then June 2021 imo, Just the duration and zero relief from the humidity made it so miserable. I'm strictly talking how I felt going outside.
You couldn't find relief going in the shade it was disgusting

June 2021 had some obscenely high dew points as well. At least it sure did in Bellingham.

[wetcoast91]

I definitely don't want more heat lol

You don't want forest fires, smoke, changing ecologies and death?

I'm personally getting bored of salmon and orca whales. Some more shark species up this way would really make going into the waters more entertaining. Bring on the scorpions and rattlesnakes as well.

[SouthSardiswx]

WOW! maybe just maybe we got it right this winter.

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouv ... ecast-2022

[Weather101]

You don't want forest fires, smoke, changing ecologies and death?

I'm personally getting bored of salmon and orca whales. Some more shark species up this way would really make going into the waters more entertaining. Bring on the scorpions and rattlesnakes as well.

Well... Now that you put it like that ..

[Weather101]

June 2021 had some obscenely high dew points as well. At least it sure did in Bellingham.

Oh for sure I'm just saying personally for me this was worst

[Typeing3]

Interesting article.

Smoke seasons aren't new but our efforts to control wildfires are, and should change
by Mica Jorgenson
August 21st, 2021
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-seasons-e ... res-1.html

Like many people, I will remember this summer in shades of gray and red. As snapshots of a dull orange sun circulated social media, "zombie fires" rose from the Russian permafrost, entire towns were wiped off the map and Southern Europe became a scene of the apocalypse.

Satellites tracked enormous plumes of wildfire smoke across North America, the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Circle until they reached the North Pole.

Although the 2021 smoke season is in many ways unprecedented, smoke seasons themselves are not new. Western North America is particularly susceptible to smoke because Pacific winds carry it up and down the continent among active fire ecosystems in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska.

Newspapers from 1926, 1945, 1958 and 1967 included complaints from British Columbians about the veil of smoke from forest fires. These were later corroborated by the layers of black carbon found in ice and sediment cores taken from glaciers and lake beds.

As an environmental historian, I use archival documents—photographs, forest service records, media accounts, oral interviews—to learn about large-scale smoke events in the past. In one of the best documented examples, smoke from an enormous fire in the Peace River district in northern British Columbia and Alberta choked the entire northern hemisphere in 1950. As the giant plume drifted east, it left a trail of anxious headlines behind it.

In New York: "Forest Fires Cast Pall On Northeast; Canadian Drift 600 Miles Long Darkens Wide Areas and Arouses "Atom' Fears." In Edinburgh: "Scots See Blue Sun, Fear End of World." And in Oslo: "Solen og månen ble koboltblå!" ("The sun and the moon became cobalt blue!"). By October 1950, the smoke had circumnavigated the Earth.

If smoke seasons are not new, what makes this summer different?


Wildfire smoke difficult to regulate
Climate change makes wildfire seasons longer and more intense, but our checkered history of how we address smoke makes controlling it difficult.

Before clean air regulations came into effect in Europe, Canada and the United States, industrial smoke was common in cities. Wildfire smoke was just one more pollutant in already gray skies. This was especially true for working class and racialized people, who often lived near smoke-producing factories.

During summer, wildfire smoke could make industrial smoke worse. In 1937, in an address to the annual conference of the Scottish branch of the National Smoke Abatement Society, John R. Currie, a professor of public health at Glasgow University, argued that wildfire smoke from Idaho had worsened industrial pollution for the cities in its path.

At the time, public health initiatives recognized that smoke was harmful, but there was little regulators could do about the smoke drifting out of the forests. Anti-pollution legislation and the introduction of new cleaner-burning fuels gradually reduced visible industrial pollution in most cities, but wildfire smoke remained a periodic problem.


Forests depend on fire
Historians have documented the long history of fire suppression in western North America. In British Columbia, the public believed that fire fighting technology would one day completely eliminate wildfire and smoke. For example, one of the first actions of the newly created Forest Service in British Columbia in 1912 was to create a permit system for burning.

"Slash burning" was still used to dispose of logging waste—the leftover tree limbs and other residues are called slash—but became tightly controlled. When slash fires escaped and burned communities, like the Gleneden fire of 1973, slash burning developed a negative reputation.

Over the years, experts proposed alternatives to burning such as chipping or cattle grazing to reduce landscape fuel, methods that had been used successfully elsewhere. However, the size and extent of Western Canada's forests means slashing remains the primary method for clearing flamable logging waste, despite ongoing criticism.

We now know that western ecosystems require frequent, low-intensity fire to remain healthy and balanced. Decades of fire suppression has created more explosive and unpredictable conditions. Despite rapid advances in fire detection and fire fighting technology, fire seasons have gotten worse, not better.

Now experts are calling for more prescribed burns to restore fire to the land and mitigate modern smoke seasons. There is good scientific evidence to support them.

According to these experts, the question is not whether or not we should have smoke in the atmosphere, but when and how much of it we want to breathe. Yet most of places where forest fires pose the biggest threat have yet to implement prescribed burns on a wide scale. For example, the Prescribed Fire Council's 2020 report shows that the American West lags behind the Southeast. Prescribed fire is not widely used in Southern Europe or Canada.


The future is smoky
Significant barriers remain to returning fire and smoke to our lives. In the past, people believed forest fire smoke was less harmful than industrial smoke. We now know that forest smoke poses significant health risks on par or worse than those of industrial smoke. Wildfire services, staffed largely by foresters and ecologists, are ill-equipped to make these kinds of public health decisions.

Climate change has made the decision to use prescribed fire more difficult. Although cultural or Indigenous burning promise a more holistic and inclusive approach to restoring fire to the land, colonial governments must avoid unloading the litigation and health risks of prescribed fire onto Indigenous communities, which already experience disproportionate impacts from wildfire and smoke.

Smoke seasons are not new, although climate change has exacerbated their scale and intensity. In planning for a smoky future, history shows how our responses to fire and smoke are cultural. Solutions like prescribed burning must take our historic relationship with fire and smoke into account.

[Typeing3]

As mentioned in the article, here are a couple examples of those historic smokey summers on the south coast, as documented in local newspapers:

Summer 1945
July 20th, 1945
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/499805730/

Unofficial Rain Won't Kill Smoke
Rain, which fell "unofficially" on Vancouver today, is not expected to dispel the cloud of smoke which hangs over the city. The smoke is from huge forest fires, blazing in the woods of Washington and Oregon. These districts are tinder dry with no signs of rain. Showers over B.C's coastal region, however, are dousing what is left of the forest fires in this district. All are either under control or extinguished. Today's rain came as a surprise to the weatherman, who had predicted fair weather for today with some slight showers probable over the week-end.

"Had it not been for Uncle Sam's forest fire smoke blowing over to this side of the line, we would have had bright weather, with only high, thin clouds overhead," said the weatherman. Obscured by the U.S. smoke clouds, the sun, which otherwise would have shone fairly brightly on Thursday, took on the appearance of an eclipse which could be watched directly with the naked eye. In Vancouver Forest District, where last week forest fires devastated thousands of acres of merchantable timber, mostly on the Island, favorable southeast winds blew up today to help cooler temperatures and higher humidity extinguish woods blazes now well under control.


SEATTLE IN HAZE
Smoke clouds from the U.S. are blowing north mainly from the Olympic Peninsula and the region of Tillamook, near the mouth of the Columbia River. The smoke blanket over western Oregon and Washington, estimated from 4000 to 10,000 thick, has dropped temperatures five to six degrees. Smoke and ashy haze from Grays Harbor and northwest (Continued on Page 2.) See FIRE.


Fire Threatens 275,000 Acres
SALEM, Ore., July 20. (AP)
A deputy state forester warned today that a brief spell of "fire weather" might spread the 35,000 acre Wilson River blaze over 275,000 acres. He was positive that the entire Tillamook burn area would go up in smoke if the area should get two days of high winds, hot temperature, low humidity. The only thing that can save it would be several inches of rain.

Summer 1958
July 28th, 1958
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/492331235/

That's Only Smoke Hanging Over City
It's just smoke, not cloud, over Vancouver. The smoke is from forest fires and there is not a drop of rain in sight.
The weatherman says the outlook is for continuing sunny and warm weather. The temperature today is expected to hit 83 degrees, equaling the year's record high, set July 7, and repeated Sunday. Tuesday's temperature is expected to hit 80 degrees. There may be a few scattered thunderstorms over the northeast mountains tonight.

However the weatherman says there is no chance of any rain from them touching Greater Vancouver. We have now had 18 days without a trace of rain and a month with no appreciable rainfall. Park Board officials estimated 160,000 sweltering people tried to beat the heat at the beaches Sunday in Greater Vancouver. It really didn't do much good though as the water itself reached a lukewarm 67 degrees.


Blazing Forests Shroud City
British Columbia is ablaze today with almost 300 forest fires. Their smoke, spelling out a huge loss of natural resources, hangs heavy over Vancouver. It is already the worst forest fire year on record despite the fact that the most hazardous period, August and early September, is still to come.

The B.C. Forest Service says firefighting costs have new exceeded $1,500,000. Un told millions of dollars worth of timber have been destroyed. More than 1.000 men are fighting the fires in all parts of the province, in the Cariboo, down to the border, and on Vancouver Island. It will continue to be a losing battle unless there is a break in the hot, dry spell and there is no sign of that.

Hardest hit is the Prince George area where an estimated 1,000,000 acres are burning. The timber loss there over the past two months is estimated at least $7,000,000. Two lives were lost there Saturday. John Yadeau, 30, and his son, John, Jr., 9, were killed when their truck overturned. They were rushing supplies to firefighters at Willow River. Two others in the truck were injured.

There are also large fires at Harrison Lake (3,500 acres) and on the international border at Chilliwack Lake 11,000 acres). There are 65 fires burning in scattered parts of the Vancouver forest district which covers southwest B.C. The forest service is using helicopters to fly men into the remote fires and water-toting aircraft to douse spot fires. The copters took four crews into central Vancouver Island Saturday and dropped another two crews today near Squamish.

Vancouver parks superintendent Phil Stroyan today said the fire hazard had extended to the huge Stanley Park in Vancouver. He urged the public to be "extremely careful especially with cigarette butts" when visiting the park. The park's regular employees, 100 during the day, 20 at night, are keeping a special watch and four extra fire guards have been hired, he said.

Forest Fire Near Chilliwack, summer 1958

Screenshot 2022-08-02 171623.jpg

Source: https://search-bcarchives.royalbcmuseum ... chilliwack

[Radar]

You don't want forest fires, smoke, changing ecologies and death?

I'm personally getting bored of salmon and orca whales. Some more shark species up this way would really make going into the waters more entertaining. Bring on the scorpions and rattlesnakes as well.

I’d be more for pretty girls wearing less. I don’t need rattlesnakes because you just know the horseflies will come before them and I hate those things.

[Roberts Creeker]

WOW! maybe just maybe we got it right this winter.

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouv ... ecast-2022

Daily hive and farmer's almanac....hmmmm

[SouthSardiswx]

I’d be more for pretty girls wearing less. I don’t need rattlesnakes because you just know the horseflies will come before them and I hate those things.

That's sic mini me however you do have a valid point there. I do find El Nito's point rather intriguing how ever why not go all in for a Jurassic park look around these parts.
It's a very refreshing 22c this evening @ the pond in south Sardis.