Will smoke from latest fires impact Sacramento? What to expect in Northern California

Thick smoke from a cluster of intense wildfires burning near Santa Rosa is expected to blow east, directly toward Sacramento, possibly beginning as soon as Monday evening.

The local National Weather Service office at 9:30 a.m. posted a smoke forecast showing expected conditions over the next 12 hours, highlighting four serious wildfire incidents burning in three distinct parts of Northern California that each erupted in size and intensity during Sunday’s extremely gusty winds.

Forecasters currently predict an evening shift in wind, transitioning from northeast-to-southwest gusts to an east-to-west onshore pattern, that could blanket much of Yolo and Solano counties with heavy near-surface smoke starting around 7 p.m.

Polluted air could reach Sacramento by about 10 p.m., the NWS forecast predicts.

The smoke most likely to affect the Sacramento area is from the Glass Fire, a series of closely related wildfires that started early Sunday morning in Napa and Sonoma counties and gathered immense speed by that evening. Cal Fire reported the blaze at 11,000 acres with 0% containment Monday morning.

Local air districts at SpareTheAir.com still classified the Sacramento region’s air quality as “good” shortly before 10 a.m. Monday, with air quality index readings below AQI 50 downtown and elsewhere in Sacramento County. However, the air quality website notes in its most recent forecast summary that “numerous” Northern California wildfires are likely to deteriorate conditions Monday, Tuesday and possibly beyond.

Smoke outlook for midweek or later will depend on the intensity and activity on the Glass Fire, which is currently out of control, and how much smoke it ends up producing.

Smoke from Zogg Fire, North Complex and more

Large amounts of smoke are flowing from three other wildfires in two different parts of Northern California.

The Zogg Fire sparked Sunday afternoon in Shasta County, about 15 miles southwest of Redding near the towns of Igo and Ono. It grew extremely rapidly, up to a reported size of 7,000 acres by Sunday evening and then more than doubling to at least 15,000 acres by Monday morning, according to Cal Fire.

That new fire is burning roughly 30 miles northwest of the edge of Mendocino National Forest, where the state’s largest recorded wildfire ever, the August Complex, continues to burn more than 875,000 acres and produce huge quantities of smoke, according to a Monday morning U.S. Forest Service incident report.

Smoke from those two fires is currently blowing west toward the coast, and has been forecast by the NWS to stay primarily south of Eureka before starting to shift to the east and southeast later Monday: heavy smoke could cover nearby Redding and the Red Bluff area starting around 7 p.m., NWS radar forecasts show.

Also Sunday evening, flames kicked up on the North Complex, a series of lightning-sparked wildfires that have been burning since mid-August near Plumas National Forest, close to the Butte-Plumas county line.

The latest flare-up has produced a new wave of smoke that the NWS predicts will first blow west toward Chico by early afternoon, then curl south through to Yuba County by evening, with a less concentrated patch potentially extending into Marysville and Yuba City.

The state has already suffered severe smoke impact — from orange skies that spanned from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada foothills, to AQI readings well over 200 making it “very unhealthy” to spend any significant amount of time outdoors — for the better part of the past month and a half, ever since dozens of major wildfire incidents sparked across the state beginning in a freakish mid-August thunderstorm that dropped thousands of lightning strikes.

Abysmal air quality stopped plaguing the Sacramento area a little less than two weeks ago, as onshore winds from the Bay Area pushed persistent smoke from the North Complex, August Complex and other wildfires out of the region.

But now, poor air may be well on its way back, as winds blowing in the same direction that previously gave it a reprieve are now carrying smoke from the North Bay fires directly toward the capital.

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