After last week’s hot weather, with over 90 degree Farenheit temperatures several days, I welcomed this week’s cooler 70+ degree days.
For the past three days, I’ve been busy gardening.
I finally planted potted perennial flowers and vegetable plants I’ve kept on my porch during the hot temperatures, without worrying about them shriveling up from the intense heat.
That changed today when southeast Michigan air quality took a serious decline into the unhealthy range, according to AirNow.
According to the AirNow website:
AirNow reports air quality using the official U.S. Air Quality Index (AQI), a color-coded index designed to communicate whether air quality is healthy or unhealthy for you.
The largest city in southeast Michigan, Detroit ranked as the second worst city in the world this morning for air quality, behind New Delhi, India.
Yikes!
What’s Causing Low Air Quality?
For the past several weeks, smoke from wildfires in Canada have moved throughout Canada as well as northern portions of the United States, prompting air quality alerts throughout the two countries.
Smoke from the ongoing Quebec and Ontario fires this week moved into our southeast Michigan area.
Earlier this morning, the U.S. National Weather Service published an advisory from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy which declared today and tomorrow to be Air Quality Action Days for 17 counties in southeast Michigan.
Air quality in our community was at 171 when I checked it this morning.
It’s now hovering around 153, still in the unhealthy range.
Whoa.
A Few Thoughts on the AirNow Website
Speaking from my own experience, the AirNow air quality website has a number of features I like:
- Clean interface
- Multiple options, enter a city, town, or zip code, to display the fire and smoke map for my area
- Familiar dial (color-coded, but with markers showing levels) of the numerical result and where it falls within their air quaility scale
In addition, I appreciate the ease of getting air quality information about my community and state, including where local monitors are located.
As for me, I’m staying inside today (and likely tomorrow) with the air purifier running.
