‘Unhealthy’ air quality expected in eastern Minnesota through Monday afternoon due to wildfire smoke

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As 1,000 plus total fire personnel continue to battle the so-called July Lightning Incident and Little Knife fires around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and wilderness land, there are new signs pointing to a heightening fire threat lasting into the fall. 

The first picture you’ll see is the August fire weather outlook, for potential new fires. Notice a ton of places (the Everglades, Gulf coast, Pacific Northwest, etc.) are a part of this. If you look at the historical track record, that’s all to be expected. 

We’re in a drought — though the last batch of big rains really did a lot to help — and so fuels are quite dry. I pulled some data from fuel moisture on Monday and that’s posted right below this paragraph. The point is, that even after all this recent rain, the Boundary Waters and North Shore are still home of the driest wood in the state of Minnesota. At least, on Monday. 

Now we zip ahead to October, since effectively, September looks about the same as August’s map. OK, this looks a lot different. Puerto Rico is still lit up but the rest of the USA is all blank on the map… except for northern Minnesota. 

The three month outlook still favors drier weather. If you only looked at the Climate Prediction Center maps this far out, you might think we just have normal temperatures. The weather maps are not really in agreement there. 

So, higher heat deeper into a drier fall would not be great. Note the similarity below for November 2026. We’re going to do some more deeper dives into the winter impacts of El Niño on wildfires in the future. Because there’s often a lot of snow blanketing northern Minnesota, there’s not exactly a lot of data points on Super El Niño and winter wildfires in Minnesota. 

We’ve obviously had a ton of lightning in the Boundary Waters over the last 45 days. In many cases, there’s been more lightning strikes per acre than one might expect in a full calendar year. That’s based off of this Vaisala data above. 

Vaisala is a Finnish company and they’ve got a ton of data for lightning; they’re basically the world leaders in anything lightning technology-related. This year has been a lot different, of course. But if lightning is limited going into the fall, that would be better news for Minnesotans. 

Weather and Climate News

Updraft® - Minnesota Weather News

Ben Cathey

Author

There is heightened risk for wildfires to form over northern Minnesota late this summer and continuing into fall. This is separate from the already-started fires in the Boundary Waters region. 

New maps point toward increased fire threat this fall

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