9/27/12 Air Quality Monitoring to Begin in Liberty, WA

     Back burns planned for the Table Mountain fire in the next day or two may cause smoke accumulations in the area of Liberty, WA and some surrounding small communities.  To quickly respond to this situation, the Forest Service temporary monitor currently in Cle Elum will be moved to Liberty today (9/27).  A new monitor to replace the one in Cle Elum has been ordered and should be in operation late in the afternoon tomorrow (9/28).  So later today the Cle Elum monitor (Smoke 66) will drop off and then reappear a few hours later at its new location in Liberty.  
      Monitoring values recorded by Forest Service temporary monitors can be accessed here: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/smoke.pl  Note that the values you see are 1 hour averages of particulate concentration recorded in UTC time (subtract 7 hours to get Pacific Daylight Time).  Department of Ecology has provided a rough conversion of 1-hour averages to WAQA health categories in the document accessed on this page called. “Interim Guidance for Wildfire Smoke and WAQA”.

The Table Mountain News Release for today is here: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/article/3269/17895/