Another damned wildfire starting up this morning…
Usual for me to search the horizon whilst walking. Starting off, this morning at 11:20AM MDT…there was nothing showing over on the Sangre de Cristo range. We’re west of Santa Fe. The Sangres are east of Santa Fe.
Coming back along our fenceline 10-15 minutes later, this is what I saw. At first, the column of smoke at the apparent starting point was columnar, 3-4 times higher than you see it here. Then, the North wind must have picked up over that side of the county and it blew out and south the way you see it.
No fun, taking iPhotos like this, believe me.
Eideard 
A time-lapse captured by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, shows two devastating events happening in the Western United States. The first is a wildfire outbreak in northern New Mexico that started last month and has intensified in the past two weeks, fueled by extreme drought and high winds. The second is a dust storm caused by violent winds in Colorado.
Seven large fires were burning in New Mexico as of Tuesday, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The satellite image shows four of them. The westernmost is the Cerro Pelado fire, covering about 27,000 acres near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The northernmost is the Cooks Peak fire, covering about 59,000 acres near Taos. Just south of that are the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires, which merged around April 22 into one huge, 160,000-acre blaze.
[video src="https://vp.nyt.com/video/2022/05/04/100276_1_04cli-noaa-vid_wg_720p.mp4" /]
7AM MDY, tomorrow morning, 6th
“Forest Service says it failed to account for climate change in New Mexico blaze
A new report lays out the agency’s actions in a planned burn that exploded into New Mexico’s largest wildfire in history.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/21/forest-service-report-fire-new-mexico/
“The Board of County Commissioners of Santa Fe County in New Mexico passed a resolution Tuesday urging the U.S. Forest Service and the Santa Fe National Forest to conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for a planned very large fuel management project.
The 50,566-acre Santa Fe Mountains Landscape Resiliency Project would involve prescribed fire and vegetation thinning treatments on 36,680 acres to improve ecosystem resilience by reducing stand density, stand continuity, and stand homogeneity and increase a diverse forest structure at a landscape scale. At least 750 acres would be treated each year with manual or mechanical vegetation thinning and no more than 4,000 acres per year would be treated by the use of prescribed fire during a 15- to 20-year project time frame.” https://wildfiretoday.com/2022/07/14/county-commissioners-urge-usfs-to-conduct-eis-on-50000-acre-fuel-treatment-project-in-new-mexico/
Will that include providing access to breathable air to folks in the county?
“A team of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory looks at how wildfire soot absorbs sunlight, contributes to climate change” https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2022/07/28/lanl-team-looks-at-how-wildfire-soot-absorbs-sunlight-contributes-to-climate-change/
LANL: “Wildfire-smoke observations fill gap in estimating soot’s role in climate change
Measurements of variations in light absorption by coated soot particles lead to a reliable way to predict their global warming effect” https://discover.lanl.gov/news/0721-wildfire-smoke-observation
“Four of the largest wildfires in recent New Mexico history” https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/new-mexico/devastating-nm-wildfires/
See also “Fire History in the greater Santa Fe fireshed” https://foreststewardsguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SFFireshed_TreeRingsFirescars_FactSheet.pdf
The Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition http://www.santafefireshed.org/