NJ had poor air quality, orange skies last June. Will wildfire smoke return in 2024?

4-minute read

The first sign of trouble blew into New Jersey last year as a benign spectacle.

Smoke from raging wildfires in Canada lingered high in the atmosphere over the Garden State for a few days in late May, allowing for few stunning sunrises and sunsets in a grainy sky. Then, a few weeks later, wildfires erupted closer to the East Coast in Quebec, and a perfect set of weather conditions sent a record amount of smoke billowing into New Jersey for three days, creating a serious public health threat.

A year after the skies turned dark orange on June 6 and the noxious odor of burning wood wafted across the region for days, the threat of wildfire smoke remains due to the gradual warming of the planet, experts say.

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It threatens to turn back a lot of the progress made to clean the region’s air. It has emerged at a time when asthma rates are already on the rise and the number of senior citizens, who are more susceptible to developing chronic lung disease, is expected to explode in New Jersey over the next few years.

Despite the existential threat, there’s some good news — New Jersey will not likely see a smoky rerun of last summer, experts say.

How much of a danger it presents year to year is unknown since conditions have to be just right — not only for wildfires to ignite and linger as long as they did in Canada last year — but for the particular wind alignment to carry all that smoke into the region.

“The threat is going to be different every year because of changes in weather patterns,” said Greg Pope, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Montclair State University.

“There was a perfect circulation system that allowed all that smoke to come down here and that’s not going to happen all the time,” Pope said. “The issue is that the risk is increasing due to climate change and there’s no reason to believe there won’t be a continued threat.”

El Nino transitioning to La Nina

Wildfire season has not been as bad as last year — the worst in Canada’s history, with a record amount of acreage burned. But pockets of wildfires are still still erupting up north, prompting air quality alerts in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota last month. Several fires have ignited in Quebec and southern Ontario in recent weeks.

Helping matters is that the weather phenomenon El Nino is transitioning to La Nina — a cooling of the Pacific Ocean surface that generally brings more rain to North America in the summer.

Despite the forecasts, New York City health officials have already sent out a health advisory to hospitals and other medical providers with a quick overview of the threat wildfire smoke poses along with safety measures that should be taken by those with underlying lung diseases.

Have smoke will travel

Wildfire smoke is not new to New Jersey. The state has hundreds of wildfires each year, from the Highlands to the Pinelands. But unlike Canada or northern California, the amount of fuel that New Jersey forests provide is limited in the nation’s most densely-populated state. Combine that with robust local fire departments and the state forest fire service, and most wildfires are often brought under control quickly in New Jersey.

Still, the region has seen its sky grow hazy in recent summers, including 2020, due to smoke that traveled across the continent from large fires mostly in California. But the smoke from those fires was high in the atmosphere and did not pose a health risk — unlike the Canadian fires last year.

Although June 6 to 8, 2023 saw historically bad air quality in New Jersey with a never-before-seen concentration of small particles of burning wood, wildfire smoke continued to sweep into the region well into July. It was at lower levels, but still concentrated enough to cause health alerts for young children and the elderly.

Asthma-associated emergency department visits were 17% higher than normal among all age groups in the U.S. from April 30 to Aug. 4 last year at the height of the wildfire season, according to a study. Although data is limited for New Jersey, another study in New York showed emergency department visits for asthma doubled for all ages in some of the hardest-hit regions near Lake Ontario, and tripled among older children and young adults.

Cleaner fuels have improved air quality, reduced NJ deaths

The threat of wildfire smoke disrupts the steady progress that has been made cleaning up the region’s air.

Although smog remains a constant problem, especially in summer, microscopic particles that once inundated the air due to burning materials such as coal, diesel fuel and wood have dropped considerably. Cleaner energy generation and more efficient emission controls mandated by environmental laws have been credited along with such market forces as a glut of cheaper energy alternatives, including natural gas.

That, in turn, has caused deaths related to air pollution exposure to drop from 135,000 in 1990 to 71,000 in 2010, according to a 2018 study by the University of North Carolina.

“Our air is much better than it was, say, in the 90s,” said Kevin Stewart, director of Environmental Health for the American Lung Association. “The problem is you can see that being turned back by climate change. It’s undoing a lot of progress that’s been made.”

Meanwhile, Rutgers scientists have been studying the toxicity of the smoke from last year’s Canada wildfires and its long-term health implications.

Air monitors near the New Brunswick campus registered a high of 330 micrograms per cubic meter of particles — about 10 times above New Jersey’s air quality standard — over four hours on June 7 last year. It was the equivalent of breathing in secondhand cigarette smoke in a confined room.

Papers are scheduled to be published in journals over the next few months, and Rutgers will host a conference on the findings in the fall, said Philip Demokritou, director of the school’s Nanoscience and Advanced Materials Center.

“We wanted to find out the chemistry of the particles from those wildfires,” Demokritou said. “We also wanted to see what happens to those particles when they come into contact with pollution that’s already in the air.”