Colorado's Whiplash Weather Causes High Easterly Winds, Fires, Smoke In PNW

I was having a virtual tea party with a friend from the old pagan Circle days who now lives in Colorado, and she was saying it was 99 degrees F that day and in 24 hours it was going down to 28 and snowing!

That air pressure and temperature shift is causing a massive wind event from the east to push west, blowing up any sparks or fires into conflagrations at the absolute WORST time of the year. Everything in the rainy Pacific Northwest dries out during our normal annual drought season. Somewhere between late May and early July, the skies open up and we have mostly dry weather for July and August (sometimes June, too) often through part or even all of September (especially in the last decade, it’s like summer has moved to later in the year.)

Fires from powerlines being knocked down by trees is an issue. They actually turned off the power through a travel corridor leading up to Mt. Hood ahead of the wind storm. I used to live on the far western side of that corridor. The wind is especially ferocious for the Columbia River Gorge (most of the border between Oregon and Washington)– up to 60 mph gusts and sustained winds in the 30-40 mph range. My sister, mother, and several friends had their power go out from trees knocking down lines.

It’s not as bad where I live. We had some decent wind yesterday and it’s breezy today, but nothing like what’s going on south of us. However, smoke from those fires is coming from the east and our skies turned smokey. Mostly from 1 fire by a Native American Reservation.

As you can see, the Cold Spring Canyon fire is a fucking monster.
That entire area inside the red dots? Yeah–not contained at all yet.

The fire situation here was pretty good all summer, but these winds just whipped things up FAST.

State of Washington right now. The gray areas are where there is smoke build-up. It changes by the hour.

Closer to my area in western Washington even has a few issues. The Kitsap Peninsula (left side in gray) has no fires.
However, you’ll note that just across the way, slightly east and south of Tacoma, several smaller fires have flared up.

The smoke from that monster fire and several smaller ones is being funneled straight into our region. So we have all these air quality warnings that go out.

Normally, our air quality is great, like this place: 
Note the dark green with the grinning, smiling emoji smiley face! You’ll see that the higher the number, the worse the air quality. A 7 is Good. (Actually great!)

But lately, most people, such as ourselves, are getting at least this bad. I love the grim look of the emoji.
You can see they include daily and hourly timelines. Close to where I live was doing worse earlier on.

The score is 135, which is easily noticable if you go outside. The smell is overwhelming at that point.

And for many it’s much worse. In the deep purple “Very Unhealthy for everyone” catagory, we get THIS:

Now you see the long term totals for months. November and December had air inversions that created smog. However, this particular period we got the ANGRY FACE EMOJI. The score of 233 is really, really bad.

For for the poor people right next to the monster Cold Spring Canyon fire?
THEY ACTUALLY HAVE A DEATH FACE EMOJI!

The score is crazy! 460!?!?! That basically means you need a respirator to breath or you could DIE.
I’ve rarely seen the smoke get that bad. That monster fire created a plume that has reached us already.

It’s overly exciting weather-wise in my part of the world. I’m hardly alone. Weather disasters are sort of ongoing in many, many places these days. For us– this is the scary time of the year. Fires can pop up anywhere.