New York residents began smelling smoke on Tuesday evening (reported The Guardian) and air quality alerts were triggered on Wednesday. The US EPA’s AQI figure (from which the colour codes on the map linked above are derived), hit a peak of 484 at 5pm on Wednesday, according to Mayor Eric Adams (as noted by CNN) well into the level considered “hazardous”. IQAir’s index aims to provide a globally consistent metric, and so differs from the generic Air Quality Index (AQI) figures also often quoted in media coverage, whose calculation method varies from country to country.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires was still affecting many areas of the Eastern US on Friday 9 June (as indicated by the many red areas on the government’s Fire and Smoke map), although this appeared to have subsided from an apparent peak on Wednesday, during which New York city was ranked as having the worst air quality in the world by IQAir’s World Air Quality Index (AQI). The New York city skyline on 6 June (image credit: quiggyt4 / ).
