Smoke from major fires in California and Canada used to veil the French sky.
The images from New York are impressive: the skyscrapers and monuments are camouflaged behind an omnipresent orange veil, witnesses spread an “unbreathable” atmosphere … The American city has been hit by smoke from more than 150 fires that are ravaging Canada since Tuesday , although there is a distance of 800 kilometers between these two points.
Do the winds favor the arrival of the fumes in Europe?
This is due to weather conditions in Canada and the United States. Nova Scotia and Quebec are currently in a low-pressure system, while New York is experiencing a northwesterly wind, meteorologist Guillaume Séchet told BFMTV.com.
However, the meteorologist points out that France should not be affected by these fumes in the coming days. And in any case, if the smoke were billowing across French skies — as was the case back in 2020 with the gigantic fires in California, where Paris skies were shrouded in smoke — France would not be “not so badly affected.” like New York,” said Guillaume Séchet.
Simulations of how the smoke from these fires would spread to the United States exist and are being circulated on social networks, but none are currently available for Europe, he says.
When western currents are at work, it takes “5 to 7 days” for a disturbance to travel from the United States to France and Europe in general, explains Guillaume Séchet. Currently, however, the trend is more towards currents from the east or from the south: specifically, France will not be affected by the air from the USA or Canada in the coming days.
If the fires in Canada continue, this scenario is possible, but “not in the next ten days,” said Guillaume Séchet.
The fumes soon spread across the planet
However, the specialist reminds that at some point, “in a few weeks, a few months”, the fumes will “be emitted all over the planet” because “everything is mixed” in our planet’s unique atmosphere. However, this “may not be visible in Europe”.
In the United States, and in New York in particular, concentrations of fine particulate matter in the air have reached at least 16 times the limit set by the WHO since the pollution episode began.