Weather Outlook Through Monday (NOAA WPC/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
According to NOAA's Weather Prediction Center, the extended precipitation outlook shows heavier precipitation developing from parts of the Western US into the Central US and in the Eastern US. Some of the heaviest rain will be found closer to the Tennessee River Valley with several inches of rain possible there through next week.
Extended Precipitation Outlook (NOAA WPC/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(NOAA/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
"Over 400 wildfires are raging across Canada this week and firefighting teams have been overwhelmed by the flames. Canadian officials have asked for foreign support, and several countries have offered to send supplies and people, including the United States. As of yesterday, the U.S. has deployed more than 600 firefighters and support personnel to help on the ground emergency response teams, according to the White House. Other countries have sent emergency response teams to Canada this week too. More than 200 firefighters from South Africa arrived in Alberta this past weekend. Several EU nations including France, Portugal, and Spain have also offered to send 280 firefighters and supplies to Canada too, Barron's reported."
"On Monday evening, meteorologists at the National Weather Service center in Upton, New York, noticed something unusual in the satellite imagery. A thick wall of smoke from a series of wildfires that had broken out across Nova Scotia was moving south toward the Empire State. After examining the wind patterns and speed of the plume's movement, the meteorologists forecast it would enter the country's most densely populated city by the following morning. Sure enough, New Yorkers awoke on Tuesday to gray air that thickened over the course of the day. By evening the city smelled like a bonfire. By the following afternoon, the air had turned orange. When Stanford researchers crunched the numbers, they found that Wednesday, June 7 was the worst day of pollution from wildfire smoke in the nation's history, in terms of the average American's smoke exposure. Air quality plummeted across the Eastern United States, affecting cities from Charlotte to Philadelphia to Chicago. But in no city was the air worse than the Big Apple. The air quality index, or AQI, in parts of Brooklyn reached 484 — nearly double San Francisco's highest hourly reading during California's 2020 fire season. In a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it "a health and environmental crisis," and urged residents to take precautions. New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the situation was "alarming and concerning," and told people to mask up and stay indoors."
"The Krakatoa eruption of 1883 was one of the deadliest in recorded history. The volcano, which lies on an island in Indonesia's Sunda Strait, had been threatening to blow for months. It had been sending plumes of ash and steam into the sky since May of that year, but at 1pm on 26 August the pressure beneath its rocky cones finally became too much. Four increasingly violent explosions over the next 24 hours all but destroyed the island. They killed over 36,000 people and could be heard 3,500 kilometres away in Australia. 21 cubic kilometres of rock and ash was blasted across 800,000 square kilometres and over 80 kilometres up into the air. So much ash was released into the atmosphere, the region was plunged into darkness for two and a half days. As the ash diffused and drifted around the world, its chemicals absorbed different wavelengths of light, causing spectacular red and orange sunsets and making the Moon glow blue for months."
