PNW fires

Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest wildfires continue. USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey. Speaker 2: Dozens of active wildfires burning, certainly the northwest catching the brunt of the last couple of weeks of wildfire activity. Speaker 1: The National Interagency Fire Center notes that as of August 10th, our acreage. Speaker 2: Year to date in the U.S. has now gotten up to near 6.4 million. That's land burned so far in the United States in wildfires in 2026. Compare that to the ten year average, which is just a shade above 4 million acres, and that puts us over 150% of average. Speaker 1: Rippey adds those totals include Alaska, which to date has had a below normal wildfire season. Speaker 2: Only about 70,000 acres has burned in Alaska. Speaker 1: And this is with several weeks remaining in the Western wildfire season. Speaker 2: We have seen quite a bit of activity. Obviously smoke continuing to pour from numerous wildfires and affect air quality, reduce visibility and just cause general health concerns across not just the northwest, but downstream from that. We've seen a lot of that smoke heading eastward across the northern Great Plains into parts of the northern and central Rockies, and even at higher levels of the atmosphere all the way across the continent, back into parts of the eastern United States, leading to reddish orange sunrises and sunsets and kind of a reddish moon color at night. So certainly no shortage of wildfire concerns continuing.