Smoke from Canadian Fires Reaches New York, but Shouldn’t Affect Europe in the Coming Days

In the past, smoke from major fires in California or Canada veiled the French sky.

The images from New York are impressive: the skyscrapers and monuments are camouflaged behind an omnipresent orange veil, witnesses evoke an “unbreathable” air… The American city has been affected since Tuesday by the smoke of more than 150 fires which are ravaging Canada, despite a distance of 800 kilometers separating these two points.

Winds favorable to the arrival of the fumes in Europe?

This is due to weather conditions in Canada and the United States. A depression is currently underway over Nova Scotia and Quebec, while a northwest wind is blowing over New York, meteorologist Guillaume Séchet explains to BFMTV.com.

The meteorologist indicates however that France should not be affected by these fumes in the days to come. And in any case, if the smoke flew over the French sky – as was already the case in 2020 during the gigantic fires that affected California, where the sky had been veiled by smoke in Paris -, France would not be ” not affected as significantly as New York,” said Guillaume Séchet.

Simulations of the spread of smoke from these fires to the United States exist and are relayed on social networks, but none are currently available for Europe, he says.

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When westerly flows are at work, a disturbance takes “5 to 7 days” to arrive from the United States to France and Europe in general, explains Guillaume Séchet. But currently, the trend is more towards flows from the east or from the south: concretely, for the days to come, France is not influenced by the air from the United States or Canada.

If the fires persist in Canada, this scenario will however be possible, but “not in the next ten days”, according to Guillaume Séchet.

The fumes soon diffused all over the planet

The specialist recalls, however, that the fumes will end up being “broadcast over the whole planet” at some point, “in a few weeks, a few months”, because “everything is mixed” in the unique atmosphere of our planet. However, this will “perhaps not be visible in Europe”.

In the United States, and especially in New York, the concentrations of fine particles in the air have reached at least 16 times the threshold defined by the WHO since the start of the pollution episode.