We are supposed to drive from the Bay Area to Mammoth tomorrow for a 3 day trip. Our kids were planning on going to the bike park both Sunday and Monday. I'm looking at several websites about the current and projected air quality readings because of all of the fires, but the readings are very different - some indicate it looks safe, and others show unhealthy air quality. Is anyone there right now who can tell me what it's actually like, and can let me know air quality forecast for the next 3-4 days? Driving from the San Francisco Bay Area (Walnut Creek). Thanks in advance.

Air quality shifts with the wind direction. I currently check the forecast, then look out my window, then stick my head out & do a sniff test before deciding when to water the tomatoes. Maybe not the best time for planning outdoor activities with all the ongoing uncertainty. And I wouldn't count on anyone's predictions.

There's a dense smoke advisory right now until mid-day tomorrow. Fairly good chance of rain and thunderstorms on Sunday and Monday.


https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClic...9#.X0AwIMhKg2w

Or lightening & no rain. And with the lightening the chance of many more fires, which is what started the dozens still uncontained around N. CA now from last weekend, including in places that have never had fires until now, including the Bay Area.

https://readynevadacounty.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=3207

There is no Air Quallty station in Mammoth. Reno is pretty far away and more likely to be impacted by the fires in the Sacramento Delta, etc.. I would look at the Mammoth Mountain cams on their web page.

https://www.mammothmountain.com/

This site shows a sensor at Mammoth:
https://fire.airnow.gov/



Zooming out to see the western US is a bummer.

Thanks, Nelson, very interesting! I'll be checking during the day to see what happens to our now red/purple readings. Where my family was & has now evacuated is top of the scale maroon, but where they've gone, not very far away, is green. All depends on the wind, very graphically displayed.

That's a great website, Nelson. Thanks.

It's a really useful site, I was alerted to it a few weeks ago.

I'm in Colorado. Two days ago I was talking to a friend about 50 miles away from me. He was enveloped in smoke but it was clear by me. I pulled up the site and that was exactly what it showed, a plume of smoke streaming over his town.

Good luck MmePerdu and CA folks. It looks awful there.

Thanks Nelson - that's a brilliant site. One of the permanent monitors is about 5 miles from my home . . . and red it is (at least its not purple). Seems to be a teensy bit better today even though the fires are pretty much uncontrolled.

Very true. I just got back from my 5 day shift at a central Oregon fire lookout tower. Two of the days I had visibility down to less than 3 miles. We currently have 4 or more fires in Oregon that are over 4K acres. We are also getting smoke coming from fires in northern California.

That's the nice thing about cams, when live, they are like sticking your head out the window.

You can't do the sniff test with a camera. When the smoke got bad this week, I could smell and taste it. So far the USFS trusts my judgement over a camera for detecting and reporting fires. There are a lot less fire lookouts than there were 30+ years ago. Lookouts are fighting the trend of putting cameras on lookout towers and having someone monitor 4 or more screens in a comfy office.

In watching the fire.airnow.gov link provided by Nelson (which I'm now doing every day), I was amazed at how many "fires" were detected by satellite. If you really zoom in on the map and hover over the little bull's eye icon, the spread and shape of some events (not all that are perhaps too small) appears. If you double click on the icon, the exact location by latitude/longitude is shown.