Smoke slowly clearing, may worsen later in the week
KAMLOOPS — The smoke is still lingering, but the views of Kamloops are slowly coming back with a slight clearing of the air on Monday.
According to Purple Air, which has multiple monitoring stations in the city, readings have dropped significantly – in the 150s at its peak on Monday compared to readings upwards of 500 on Saturday.
“Mainly due to the change in winds,” said Matt McDonald from Environment Canada. “Over the last 2-3 weeks, we haven’t seen much wind. We’ve been stuck on this ridge of high pressure, very stagnant kind of air mass. Finally over the weekend, we saw the flow shift to the northeast, and so that brought some mixing into the lower atmosphere and helped disipate some of the wildfire smoke.”