Canadian Smoke Hazard Thousands of Miles South

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I live and work in Greensboro NC. This morning, the smoke was so thick, you could smell it. This afternoon, there’s still a considerable haze. Visibility has been 5 miles all day. I decided to do a quick hop in my newly acquired P2006T since I hadn’t yet tested the ILS. (My first flight in it was into TNCM.) My normal hop for that is to take off from W88 heading west, hang a left at Lake Brandt, then catch the beam into 23L. All I can say is a return trip would be a bad idea right now. That beam is the only thing that got me lined up with the runway because I couldn’t see the runway until I was much closer. Trying to find W88 again in that soup would be tough! The visuals in the sim after shutdown pretty much duplicate what I saw when I left work, which is less than a mile off in the distance from where I took this screenshot.

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Oh, and the Tecnam handled the beam like a champ. I just need to remember to get slowed down a little before final - she doesn’t like to bleed off speed very well, even at idle.

For those that don’t know about the smoke from the Canadian fires, have a look at this map.

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firesmoke.ca has a pretty good map too (and a forecast). It doesn’t currently show any smoke coming all the way down to the Carolinas from Canada, so not sure where yours is coming from? Maybe more local?

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Is smoke modeled in the sim or are they adding general haze for the reported METAR visibility?

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I think it’s the sim creating haze based on METAR data rather than modeled smoke. Maybe in 2024…?

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Yep, pretty sure it just counts it as fog/humidity. A few weeks ago when the fires had just started, I launched a flight at Buffalo Niagara Int’l where the smoke was very dense. It wasn’t raining in Buffalo at the time, but live weather produced rain in Buffalo, presumably because it thought there were dense enough clouds to produce precipitation.

:joy: Definitely can’t blame the sim for failing to differentiate between smoke and humidity, but that would be cool if it did.

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It looks more like haze/fog but still better than nothing.