Get ready for the new smoky norm of the Pacific Northwest summer

A thick blanket of smoky air has smothered the Puget Sound region over the last week. It has many asking: Is this something new? Or have we collectively forgotten past hazy summers here in the Pacific Northwest?

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“The last two years have been unusually smoky,” said University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass. “During the summer time, the wildfire smoke has been usual here. There is nothing like it for decades past. But if you are 100 years old, and you remember what it was like in the early part of the 20th century and the late 19th century, this would seem like nothing. That is before we intervened in the environment. Fires were omnipresent.”

The air quality around April 15 was the worst ever recorded (with records going back to 2000). Mass says we should see some improvement in air quality over the weekend after a smoky haze blanketed Washington. But that haze will return by Monday after wildfires send another round of smoke our way.

“I don’t think it will be as bad,” Mass said. “I think the smoke will tend to be higher … the situation we had was with the smoke down to sea level. Which didn’t happen the rest of the summer. The rest of the summer, the smoke has been aloft. We just had a day or two of the smoke getting down to the surface.”

The new smoky norm

Mass, however, notes that much of the problems with the recent fires reaching unprecedented size was caused by modern forestry management practices.

“We’ve suppressed fire for almost a century,” Mass said. “That’s the real problem. The forest that we have now are completely different than the forests that were there originally. Things are completely overgrown now. The forests are much more dense than they were 100 years ago. Fire is a natural part of the environment here; it’s a natural part of the ecosystem, especially on the eastern side. There would be regular fires that would clear out stuff and clear out debris. But we suppressed fires, and we also cut down all the big stuff. So we have very dense stands of these smaller trees, and that burns much more easily. The fires can spread much more quickly.”

There are also invasive grasses to consider. They burn more easily than native varieties of ground cover in the eastern part of Washington. And there is a huge influx of people who live and play in places they never have before. All that adds up to more frequent and bigger fires than before.

Even though we stop most of the fires that start, paradoxically, that means the blazes will eventually be much more destructive than they historically ever would be.

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“So when they do burn where they can’t stop them, it explodes and you get these gigantic fires,” Mass said. “In the old days, the fires tended to be smaller because the forests on the eastern side were burning every 10-20 years so thing didn’t accumulate. But if you suppress it for 50-75 years, it’s a different story.”

Mass argues that the Northwest and California needs to take a different approach to forest management to get a handle on the problem. But in the meantime, the wildfires aren’t going away anytime soon. Not in Eastern Washington, nor Northern California, nor British Columbia.

“Now we have these forests exploding, so we’re going to have more smoke, so people better get used to it,” he said. “Unless we do what we need to do.”