For New Yorkers looking up at the sky and wondering when this sticky, smoky hellscape will end, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news, according to meteorologists from the National Weather Service, is that the worst of the Canadian wildfire smoke should clear out of the city by Friday afternoon.
The bad news is that some of it could return over the weekend and early next week — and also a chance that it could mix with rain on Saturday to blanket cars and streets with a nasty layer of soot.
“The upper level pattern does suggest that there is the possibility, if there is smoke upstream, that it could get back into the area,” said meteorologist Jim Connolly. “Exactly how much, how thick it would be, even if it does, that all remains to be seen.”
Connolly said the air conditions depend on whether the jet stream will continue to funnel smoke from Ontario down through New York and neighboring states, or whether the winds will change.
“We need a kind of shift in the overall pattern,” he said, adding that it’s still too early to tell if that will happen.
The eerie haze has been reminding New Yorkers of a similar episode in 2023, when smoke from a massive fire in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia turned city skies orange and obscured landmarks like bridges and buildings.
It still remains to be seen whether conditions will be as bad this time around. The city’s Emergency Management office warned early Thursday that NYC’s Air Quality Index — which measures the concentration of pollution — had reached the 150-200 range, which is considered unhealthy. Back in 2023, the city’s AQI measured over 200 – which is considered to be “very unhealthy” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards.
Cities in Michigan — in the direct path of the Ontario smoke — are faring much worse this week, with Detroit’s AQI close to 700 Thursday morning, according to the tracking site.
As the smoke lingers, some city agencies are making concessions to prevent people from having to spend unnecessary time outdoors. The Department of Investigation announced it had instructed city marshals to suspend evictions Thursday.
The city is giving away free masks at libraries, NYPD precincts, major transit hubs and other locations across the city and has posted a map of distribution sites online.
The smoke is expected to drop south into New Jersey and Washington, D.C. later on Friday, meteorologists said. Temperatures over the weekend are forecast to come down into the 80s, with a chance of rain on Saturday and clearer skies on Sunday.
