National Weather Service Issues Red Flag Warning For Long Island
UPTON, NY — Some Long Island residents might have woken up to the smell of smoke in the air Friday, and while the old saying goes that where there is smoke there is always fire, that was not exactly the case.
But there is still cause for concern.
A red flag warning, meaning critical fire weather conditions are expected or occurring, was issued for Long Island by the National Weather Service.
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The warning, which includes the lower Hudson Valley and New York City, will run from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday.
Red flag warnings are issued when there is a combination of meteorological conditions, like gusty winds and fuel conditions such as dry, dead grasses, leaves, and vegetation, as part of a forecast coordinated with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, weather service meteorologist Nelson Vazz told Patch.
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He expects wind gusts from 25 to 30 mph and low relative humidity, which is a contributing factor.
“Some of the plants that are kind of dying at this time of year, they’re drying out as well,” he said. “When you have a low relative humidity, it just makes them more available to burn.”
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Also part of it is the lack of rainfall for a couple of months.
“We’ve had some rain, but it really hasn’t been much,” Vazz said.
On Oct. 29 and Oct. 30 in Islip, there was one-hundredth of an inch of rain.
“That’s barely enough to wet the ground,” he said. “The last time we had anything that was a little more significant, you got to go back to Oct. 7, in which we had a 10th of an inch of rain. So that’s kind of giving a sense of how dry the whole month of October was only 1.2 inches of rain.”
As for the smell of smoke in the air Friday morning, it’s not the big wildfire in New Jersey drifting over to Long Island, but smaller brush fires.
“It’s kind of a chilly morning, what you can have is what we call something called a temperature inversion,” he said. “It’s actually colder down at the ground, then higher up. So what happens, even if there were some brush fires around, a lot of that smoke can get trapped down at the ground, so that probably just kind of intensifies maybe the smell that you may kind of get up early in the morning.”
“They smell that,” he said, adding that as the morning goes on, the ground heats up and that smell gets “mixed out a little bit more.”
No air quality advisories have been issued.
Vazz said it is not recommended to do any type of outdoor burning, like fire pits, or burning leaves.
Residents should be careful with matches, and campfires.
“When the ground is very dry, just even little sparks can light off,” he said. “I think that’s the biggest thing to be very cognizant of that. You don’t want to unintentionally set something off.”
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