1 Somewhere, there's a member of the Weather Service in Oregon, skulking through the woods with a whole lot of matches...

2

That was what I was thinking...

3

Actually, there was a time when major smoke was scheduled for about this time of year. Grass seed is a major crop around here, or it used to be. And after they harvested, they'd burn their fields to sterilize them for the next year's crop. Which filled the whole valley with smoke for a couple of weeks.

But about 1970 the legislature passed a law banning that, and the grass seed farmers had to come up with a different way of doing it that didn't create so much smoke. I remember that it pretty much stopped entirely by 1980, just before I moved to MA. So I doubt that's what this is about.

4 40 miles for a week-long fire? I don't think so. Last time Albuquerque was covered in smoke, fires were raging in Arizona, at least 200 miles away.

I you go to aviationweather.gov and look at satellite pictures, the smoke from the huge California fires is seen moving almost straight south. Perhaps weathermen expect that to change.

BTW, they are supposedly arrested the arson suspect today.

5 Wildfires don't tend to get big in the Valley because there are fire departments everywhere. Our big fires are in the mountains and in eastern Oregon, where there aren't any people. I just saw that a fire started near Forest Grove (about 15 miles west of here), but I doubt it will develop into much.

6 Just watch out when the predicted high reaches 500 degrees. You might want to relocate.
My brother lives in Ventura, and he's certainly seen smoke when the fires were more than 40 miles away, given the right wind. So I think it's plausible. But experimental results are the gold standard of science, let us know if the forecast is correct.
What shakes my faith in the weather service, is when it's raining outside, and the hourly forecast shows zero percent chance of precipitation. Obviously, they're not updating the weather forecasts here in the S.C. Piedmont on a real-time basis. (To be fair, we get these micro-storms coming down out of the mountains, sometimes it's raining in the front yard, and dry in the back.)

7 So has the smoke appeared?

8 I haven't seen any, and I haven't smelled any. I don't have any idea what they're about on this.

9 "Being a weatherman is the toughest job in the world."
-Every weatherman ever.

10 One of my neighbors is using their barbecue. Does that count?

11 I was out east near the 36 Pit fire in Estacada all day.  It was putting out a pretty sizeable plume and the wind was alternately blowing it West or North.  When I came home, coming up I-5 through Tualatin, there was a very visible layer of smoke across the valley.  I don't know if it came from the Estacada fire, Forest Grove, or got blown all the way up from the ashes of Weed, but it was pretty visible.

12 I wonder if the point of the prediction was that there was going to be a temperature inversion in the valley, which would hold in any smoke which did appear?