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Assiniboia and southern Saskatchewan experienced overcast skies throughout Monday, Sept. 14.

The smoke rolled through from Alberta overnight then coasted into Assiniboia and the surrounding regions.

For much of September, the weather as summer ended had been warm and dry with cold overnights. Compared to 2019’s rainy harvest, the dry weather in 2020 moved this year’s harvest well ahead of last year’s wet disaster. But in mid-September, Assiniboia also experienced a series of smoked-out days. Clouds soured with burnt vegetation escaped the smouldering upper atmosphere, covering much of Western Canada and filling Assiniboia’s streets and avenues with smog.

The haze derived from the fires burning across the Western U.S. and parts of British Columbia affected the air quality heath index in the latter part of September, which remained on the low side for much of Western Canada, with smoke even reported in the northern regions of the country, such as the Yukon.     

The smoke cleared for a duration last Monday, as an anticipated low-pressure system moved across Montana and North Dakota, lifting the surface winds off Saskatchewan’s northern regions and uncluttering the air from the smog for a moment. 

Subsequent weather reports indicated a risk of smoke clouds redeveloping on Tuesday with a cold front forecasted to pass through town. Although toned down from Monday, the smoke seemed doomed to linger for a bit longer.

In the meantime, officials cancelled the air advisory in Vancouver on Saturday, Sept. 19 as regular clouds substituted the smog. However, hazy clouds tainted with charbroiled wood continued to drift through Saskatchewan on the weekend of Sept. 19-20, although normal clouds were appearing over Assiniboia on Sunday afternoon along with periods of rain.

Earlier in September, the atmosphere on B.C.’s West Coast brought health concerns. Authorities in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley Regional District issued fine particulate matter advisories beginning on September 8, as the wildfires from Washington, Oregon and California shrouded Western Canada in smoke.

Lightning strikes in August had created several blazes in the Western U.S. Warm temperatures and dry conditions in September escalated the risk for more fires, said a BBC report on September 18.

The haze from the Western U.S. stretched across the Atlantic and reached Northern Europe according to the scientists from the European Commission's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) in the BBC item published by the Visual and Data Journalism Team.

The same article recounted how Donald Trump blamed the wildfires in Oregon, California, Washington and other parts of the Western U.S. on forest mismanagement. Trump’s views contradicted the majority of scientists, who declared the fires in the Western U.S. were the worst in 18 years. The scientists claimed these fires had definite associations with climate change.

California Governor Gavin Newsom concurred with the climate change narrative in a CNN report, as the firefighters in the state made significant progress against the wildfires towards the week’s end.

Donald Trump has a point about connecting the forest fires with mismanagement. 

The Little Hoover Commission argued for a change in forest management, reporting almost 27 million trees died statewide on federal, state and private lands from November 2016 to December 2017.

But the commission’s report published on Sept. 12 also linked forest mismanagement and the fires to climate change, saying 129 million trees died in California during years of drought and bark beetle infestations since 2010.

A host of scholarly papers have related droughts to climate change. According the United States Department of Agriculture, warming summer and winter temperatures have also induced beetle population outbreaks in susceptible forests, allowing the insects to exist in habitats where they were once limited by range because of colder temperatures. 

Californian forests require management – they are said to be overcrowded, making several wooded areas in the state susceptible to disease, insects and wildfires.          

Yet, since much of California’s forests are owned by the federal government and landowners – this means the state presently has its hands tied whenever attempts at forest management are instigated on a wider scale.