Air quality view of North American Atlantic seaboard
Today is a bad air day over metro Orlando and central Florida in general.
It started yesterday. I first noticed it in the afternoon when I looked up overhead and thought the atmospheric color was a bit off. I checked the Apple weather app, and for once it was shockingly accurate; the entire central Florida area was under an air quality alert for sensitive groups, which I think includes me now that I’m nearly 70.
I dug a little deeper and discovered that Canadian wildfire smoke was being diverted south along the Atlantic seaboard and over central Florida. According to various news outlets, the smoke and haze are supposed to clear out by Wednesday, tomorrow.
If the people of Florida can’t accept this as another blunt sign that we’re in the middle of an environmental catastrophe, I don’t know what will. The Canadian wildfire smoke affecting weather and health down in Florida is, as the Baptists like to say, a come-to-Jesus moment.
Tropical storm Idalia is finally moving off from North Carolina and southern Virginia, into the Atlantic. In spite of earlier speculation by some forecasters 48 hours ago, Idalia will not circle around and hit Florida again. Yes, there was some talk that Idalia would circle back after entering the Atlanta and cross Florida as a “regular” old tropical storm. Instead it looks like it will chase after Franklin across the northern Atlantic.
Now begins the cleanup phase (which had already started in those areas Idalia had passed through). It’s going to be long and expensive. And for those communities on the Gulf coast of Florida, they’re going to have to ask themselves if they really want to rebuild in the area, or move away. Idalia’s Florida landfall wasn’t nearly as destructive to human property as Ian’s because the Big Bend area isn’t as heavily developed as on Florida’s southern Gulf coast, but it was destructive enough, especially as it traveled up through Florida into south Georgia and beyond.
Idalia was frightening to me because it remained a hurricane all the way into south Georgia. After traveling across the lower southeastern U.S. it still remained an organized tropical storm. While hurricane Idalia was still in south Georgia, northern edges of the storm reached as far north as Atlanta’s southern suburbs. That’s a huge storm. Hurricanes are growing more violent (category 4 is no longer unusual) and far larger than “storms of old.” The old idea you could move further inland to avoid such storms is now a thing of the past.
And we still have three more months in the hurrican season. September 1st is tomorrow, and September is the height of the season. What are we going to face over the next 90 days?
Details
The app in the capture is Apple’s Weather app on macOS. This post was written on a 13″ 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, which I purchased on sale December 2021. I used the WordPress stand-alone application instead of the web page.
Radarwitch
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