Orange Sky

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1

This is what our sky looks like today with a combination of clouds and smoke from the wildfires. We even have light ash falling at the present time. Totally bizarre.

Edit: AQ is going into the toilet. Lotsa hits on my AQ page Union City, CA Weather - Air Quality Informaton

2

looks like skies after the australian fires 8O
we need a T shirt at the end of this year:
‘I Survived 2020’

3

You sound very optimistic about next year. Do you have inside information? :wink:

4

great business model then
next T shirt would be
’ I survived 2021’

5

I just remembered an old joke that I’m sure you all heard before:

They said, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” And sure enough, I cheered up and things got worse. :slight_smile:

Here’s an excerpt from the daily Smoke Outlook for the SF Bay Area:

[size=83]Special Statement The August Complex, as well as numerous other fires, are producing smoke impacting the entire North-Central Coast. Fires burning north, south, and east of the Bay Area will impact air quality for the foreseeable future.

Smoke
We have a lot smoke to deal with in the coming days. Several large fires are producing smoke that will periodically make its way into the Bay Area. The smoke that stayed aloft yesterday will be ground level today, so air quality will be unhealthy.[/size]

You can see how extensive the smoke plume (brown area) is on this sat loop. The smoke stretches all the way down the coast from Washington to Baja.

6

It was orange for us yesterday too… now just a sickly yellow tinge with AQI around 80.

I, too, had so many hits on my AQI page yesterday that it slowed the site down, so I switched the wxaqi.php routine to automatically cache the entries for 10 minutes and thus relieved a lot of stress on my site.

I added (in the settings area of the page)

$cacheDir = './cache/';

and replaced the getAQIdata() function with

function getAQIdata($AQIurl,$type) {
	global $$type, $cacheDir;
	
	$lclFile = $cacheDir.'aqi-'.$type.'.xml';
	$toLoad = $lclFile;
	if(!file_exists($lclFile) or
	   (isset($_REQUEST['force']) and $_REQUEST['force'] == '1') or 
	   (file_exists($lclFile) and filemtime($lclFile) + 600 < time() )) {
		$toLoad = $AQIurl;
	}
	print "<!-- using $type from $toLoad -->\n";

	$$type = array();
	$typeA = $type;
	$typeA = new DOMDocument();
	$typeA->load($toLoad);
	foreach ($typeA->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
		$itemRSS = array ( 
			'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			);
		array_push($$type, $itemRSS);
	}
	if($toLoad == $AQIurl) {
		$typeA->save($lclFile);
		print "<!-- saved $type to $lclFile -->\n";
	}
}
7

I cache the feeds that I display on my page for 5 minutes and didn’t seem to cause any heartburn. I didn’t notice any slowdown but then, I don’t get as near as many hits as you do. We have the yellowish tinge here today too and AQ is a lot worse. I hope the weather pattern changes soon and blow this smoke and ash out of here.

8

Well now we’re in the Very Unhealthy range at 209 AQI.

cur_aqi_sanfrancisco_ca.jpg
cur_aqi_sanfrancisco_ca.jpg525×400 55 KB

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