Out-of-state smoke: a trend we could start seeing more often

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – It can be tricky to figure out just when Nebraska is going to see smoke from other states. Forecasters, like National Weather Service Meteorologist Dirk Petersen, need to know the fire is happening first, and then they’ve got a dozen other things to deal with.

“You kind of go with fires that are ongoing and forecast them going forward”, says Petersen. But with the wind, fire can be “blown around both upwards, downwards, north, south, east, west”.

Luckily, a lot of the Southeastern Nebraska smoke tends to come from just over the border in Kansas when rangeland is burned. The scheduled burns make things a bit easier to track.

“There’s a pretty good pattern that can set up in the spring to summer”, says Petersen. He explains further that “low-level winds are moving into the area from the south and it doesn’t really have to travel too far for that smoke to make it to the general area.”

We do occasionally see smoke from big fires out west that make their way to the jetstream.

Petersen says, “That smoke that gets lofted up in the atmosphere can get brought down by different mechanisms, different weather patterns, to bring it down to the surface locally.”

Speaking of local, NWS can also take a closer look at things like localized smoke or gas leaks that work along the same lines as their more widespread smoke tracking.

“We can do a specialized smaller-scale forecast to see where is it going to drift, how long are the winds going to stay up, those kind of things”, says Petersen.

Whether it’s smoke, gas, or something else, the NWS is on top of it, so we can hopefully all breathe a little easier.