If you were in Boston on Tuesday and looked up, the sky was the wrong color. A brownish-yellow haze had moved in overnight, the kind of color that the atmosphere is not supposed to produce. Residents in Maine reported similar skies. Meteorologists at the National Weather Service described the visible source: smoke from wildfires burning to the north and west, carried on upper-level winds across hundreds of miles to deposit itself over the densely populated Northeast corridor.
The most intense smoke, forecasters said, was expected to push as far south as Washington DC by Thursday. Millions of people across the Midwest and Northeast were advised to limit outdoor activity, check air quality indices before exercising outside, and keep windows closed. The advisories were serious. Fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke — PM2.5, the particles small enough to penetrate deep into lung tissue — is not a minor irritant. It is a cardiovascular and respiratory hazard, particularly for the elderly, children, and people with underlying lung or heart conditions.
The fires producing this smoke were burning under conditions that have become increasingly familiar in North American summers: severe drought, elevated temperatures, and dry vegetation that reaches ignition threshold faster and burns hotter than in prior decades. The scientific literature on the relationship between these conditions and wildfire behavior is not contested. The fires are larger, the seasons are longer, and the smoke travels farther than it did a generation ago.
What makes this particular event worth marking is not the smoke itself but the geography. Wildfire smoke over the American West has become a routine summer experience for residents of California, Oregon, Washington, and the inland states. It is a different thing when the sky over Boston turns yellow. The populations of the Northeast have not built their expectations around this kind of summer air quality event. The infrastructure — the public health communications, the building ventilation systems, the cultural assumption that summer air is healthy air — has not caught up with what is now apparently a routine condition.
The National Weather Service forecast suggested the worst of the smoke would pass by Thursday as a cold front moved through. The fires producing it were not expected to be contained on that timeline. This summer will not be the last one. The brownish-yellow sky over Boston is the color of a future that the Northeast has not yet fully priced into how it thinks about the season.
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