Wildfire smoke to hang over nice weather weekend

CHRIS FARRELL: Now you're likely seeing or smelling wildfire smoke today, and the entire state is in an extended poor air quality alert that will last through Saturday, which is too bad because that's right around the time we'll start to see pleasant temperatures across the state. So here with the details is MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner. Hi, Paul.

PAUL HUTTNER: Hey, Chris. Yeah, this is supposed to be a chill time of the year in Minnesota. Late summers are usually quiet, but we've got it all going on right with storms and air quality alerts. It's been a busy few weeks here in the weather lab.

CHRIS FARRELL: I'll say. So let's break this down. Let's start with the air quality. What does it look like across the state today and the rest of the week?

PAUL HUTTNER: Yeah, it looks bad. The map is red. I'm looking at the air quality map for Minnesota right now, and red is unhealthy. And that's a reading of 150-plus for these fine particles that come from wildfire smoke in Canada. And that red area runs from the Twin Cities up through Brainerd, Fargo-Moorhead, Bemidji, the Iron Range, Duluth, Ely, all the way through the North Shore, and some of the worst areas right now are up around Grand Marais and Grand Portage. It's a reading of 221 in Grand Portage. That is very unhealthy, borderline hazardous.

So this is a thick, long duration smoke event, heavy wildfire smoke event from now through Saturday. There's a lot of smoke still being generated up in Canada, and these northerly winds are pushing it south into Minnesota. So that air quality alert goes from now until 5:00 PM Saturday, and it looks like it's gonna stick around varying waves of smoke through Friday into Saturday, before finally those winds turn back into the south and they'll start to push it north again. And we'll get some better air quality here as we head toward the weekend.

CHRIS FARRELL: It's pretty bad down here, but, boy, that sounds terrible up in Grand Marais and Grand Portage.

PAUL HUTTNER: Yeah.

CHRIS FARRELL: Yeah.

PAUL HUTTNER: Absolutely. That's some of the thicker part of this current plume.

CHRIS FARRELL: So early in the week, we did lots of reporting about these serious storms and where were the highest wind gusts, the rainfall recorded? What really got hit hard in our state?

PAUL HUTTNER: Yeah, let's start with that rain, because we've had rain 13 days in this month of July in the Twin Cities and around much of Minnesota. We've had 5.25 inches of rain in the Twin Cities. That's about an inch and a half above normal. That's a lot, but it's not nearly what has happened in West Central Minnesota.

And I often think this time of year of our farmers and our friends in the towns of Minnesota where we grow a lot of our crops. And I took a trip out by Redwood Falls last weekend. There's a lot of water standing in fields west of the Twin Cities toward the South Dakota border, and areas around Morris and Chicago had 5 to more than 8 inches of rain this week. They've had 10 to 20 inches of rain in the last month.

So those are the areas that are really, really soaked, and they're going to be happy to see the forecast because it's drier. But those wind gusts that we saw two separate systems, there was an MCS, a mesoscale convective system, a big clump of thunderstorms, went from Fargo-Moorhead down I-94, West Central Minnesota into the Twin Cities down to Rochester. 60 to 76 mile an hour winds with those 60 to 65 in the Twin Cities. That's what knocked down all those branches and trees.

And also to point out, we've been so wet. Some of those trees come down because the soil is so saturated, and the root structure can't hold it as well. You get down to Rochester, 76 miles an hour but that duratio that went through Northern Iowa, those winds were up to 99 miles an hour, Chris. So we were fortunate that didn't track through much of Minnesota.

CHRIS FARRELL: Paul, I want to hit on three topics very quickly here, but first is that serious earthquake in East Russia triggered the tsunami warnings. What happened here?

PAUL HUTTNER: Yeah, well, it's a subduction zone where the faults, the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean, these plate tectonics that we learned about in college, they slip and they make a sudden movement and they lift the sea floor. Now that quake was 8.8 magnitude. That looks like the sixth biggest on record, biggest in 70 years. So it pushes this incredible wall of water. We got lucky because it looks like Hawaii only had a couple of feet of rise, 1 to 2 feet along the West Coast. So it depends where these happen. But, yeah, huge quake, significant tsunami, but nothing like what we saw in Japan thankfully several years ago.

CHRIS FARRELL: And then the forecast across the state, what can we expect. What's going to happen this weekend?

PAUL HUTTNER: The weather part other than the smoke looks great this week. We're at 80 in the Twin Cities now, the dew point, comfortable at 59. We'll be in the upper 70s to near 80 all week. We'll have to deal with that hazy, smoky sun but better for the weekend.

Highs in the upper 70s. Less smoke. Sunday looks like the sunnier, clearer day of the weekend, Chris.

CHRIS FARRELL: Well, it's always good to talk to you, Paul.

PAUL HUTTNER: Appreciate it. Thanks, Chris.

CHRIS FARRELL: That was MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner.