The boreal forest has a tendency to burn, which means that the arctic and subarctic portions of the planet often deal with forest fire smoke in the summer. Climate change has only made this more frequent and extensive. And sadly, for a variety of reasons, this summer has (so far) been unusually bad in Fairbanks, and Alaska more broadly. As I write this, the PM 2.5 levels are over 200 ppm at my house, and we’ve been bouncing between 50 and 500 over the last couple of weeks as the fires wax and wane, and the direction of the wind changes. If you would like to learn more about what’s going on from a science standpoint, I recommend this post.
What we really need (and it doesn’t currently look like we are going to get) is several days of good rains before the conference to clear the air and nock down the fires a bit. Instead we need to be prepared for the possibility of poor air quality, which will reduce visibility (yesterday we couldn’t see more than 1 km) and prove irritating for sensitive individuals. If you know you are sensitive to air quality (e.g., you have asthma), you should make sure you bring whatever medicines and the like you use to manage these conditions. During the workshop the meeting space will have HEPA filters running to reduce COVID-19 transmission, but they will have the added benefit of removing any fine particulates the building’s ventilation system doesn’t catch.