When a supermassive smoke plume blanketed Washington last September, all eyes turned to the Washington State Department of Ecology.
“People were all sucking in this superthick smoke for a little over a week and kept asking, ‘When is it going to change?’ ” says Andrew Wineke, a communications representative with Ecology. On a typical day, the department’s air quality map sees 4,000 viewers. During the smoke storm, it saw about a million.
For smoke specialists like Ecology's Dr. Ranil Dhammapala, an atmospheric scientist, predicting that kind of change is complicated — and that complicates interactions with the public.
“At the beginning of that supermassive event, initially we thought the answer was ‘a little relief tomorrow,’ ” says Dhammapala. He and his colleagues had been working from home, still managing to provide smoke forecasts against the odds.