Is back. Welcome to our special 3 00 p. M. Edition of bay area news. The chiefs and texans kickoff at 35 30. Spare the air alert extends through tomorrow. Here is a look across the bay area. This is the view from all 20 of our live cameras. The eerie and orange color we saw yesterday, today a lot of smoky gray. The air quality is actually worse today. Most of the haze caused by several near by wildfires and just like yesterday we are seeing ash falling like snow in many parts of the bay area. Jeff is going to join us in a little bit. Lets go to raj. This is today around noon. You see San Francisco of the gray there and parts of the east bay walnut creek there. Lets show you the same camera 24 hours ago. Thats where we experienced the orangelight glow, you can see the difference from all points of the bay area. Lets get back today much brighter but still hazy and not much sun. Our air quality is worse. Scott budman is in San Francisco for us with some answers. Reporter we see the differ
When you have the sun and you have the smoke moving through, different wavelengths of light are able to pass through. Red and orange is able to pass through that smoke while shorter wavelengths in the blue color are not. So it leaves us with this red to orange color. Now, check this out. Even though we have all that smoke i showed you, air quality is reading moderate to unhealthy, but the way it looks, youd think it would be reading very unhealthy. Ill explain why it looks very unhealthy but were not breathing in very unhealthy air. Pretty complicated but ill see you back here in about 18 minutes. That does sound complicated. Thank you, jeff. So how are we coping with 22 days of bad air . Live from San Francisco to continue our coverage. Pete, how bad is the air there . Reporter yeah, well, jessica, surprisingly the air quality isnt as bad here in San Francisco as weve seen recently, but as you guys mentioned, were in this long stretch of that 22 days straight of the spare the air aler
Couple of hours. Well go ahead and get a look at the air quality. You can see as weve headed through today, as you look off toward the distance, you can see that smoke. It is cloudy. The sky has that orange haze in it, but its not necessarily in the very unhealthy air range right here in the bay area. So as you look at these live air quality monitoring sites, the only spot now thats tipped into the unhealthy category is napa. Otherwise its good in San Francisco, moderate for most of the bay area, and a few spots that are unhealthy for sensitive groups right now. So i want to talk more about the smoke and why were seeing it off towards the distance but were not necessarily smelling it as bad as it looks. And it all has to do with three different fires surrounding the bay area. We have one off to the north, the august complex, the one near fresno, the creek fire, and then the dolan fire off to the south. So with all of these fires, they are so large theyre creating whats called pyorcumul
Jose, we are very unhealthy. Whats the problem with this smoke . Why cant we get it to clear out . A couple of things we are looking at here. The main thing is the wind. The surface wind is taking the smoke. Continually smoke from the north to the south that past several days. The winds are relatively light. Lets take it one step further. I think this is really going to explain this for us. It is all about whats known as an in versiversion layer. It is warm air higher up in the atmosphere. Then on top of that you have some cooler air surfacing thats pushing the air right on down towards ground level. So we have High Pressure producing this and colder air at the surface and all of that thats getting stuck down here across the bay area. But, i am tracking two different systems thatll help potentially stir up the air. Well have more details on that coming up in about 15 minutes. Very good graphic. Good explanation, jeff. It is an eye opening few days. First from our san bruno camera. The
Parked across the bay area. We are entering week five of this unhealthy air. Lets get right to chief meteorologist jeff ranieri. What are you seeing, jeff . We are seeing some improvements here as we head through the next 24 and 48hour timeline, but its going to be a little bit slow going. We are still in the unhealthy range here for much of the bay area with that smoke and that haze staying pretty constant. But we have started to notice a key change as of the past several hours, and thats a look at these smoke plumes. You can see how the smoke plumes today were moving more off to the north and the east from the fire near fresno and also those two large fires to the away, an this storm system developing off the coastline. This is a real slow mover. Its going to take its time getting here, but as that surface cold front and the upper level low pressure system moves across, it will begin to change our air quality. Tomorrow morning we are still forecasting some unhealthy air, but in the c