Pets and Smoky Air

The wildfire smoke has a tremendous impact on all of us here in the Bay Area. But what about our pets?

When it comes to walking the dog or letting them play outside, or live outside, nothing beats relying on actual data. We've got two sources for you. We can recommend both sources, even though we have a slight preference.

PurpleAir.com is easy to remember. It's a crowdsourced map, maintained by a manufacturer of low cost air monitors, deployed IoT (Internet of Things) style. It tends to be more localized, more current, but not quite as accurate as the AirNow.gov site.

Unfortunately, the AirNow.gov site crashed during the Camp Fire last year. AirNow.gov is the gold standard for precision, run by a partnership of individual states, the U.S. federal government, Canada and Mexico. If you can only look at one source, say on your phone, our preference must lean toward "precision" over all else, thus: AirNow.gov.

That said, earlier this month we noticed a KQED report about a pilot program started in August, to combine the AirNow government monitoring devices with the PurpleAir sensors in one map. The AirNow devices are represented in circles and the PurpleAir sensors represented in squares, with triangles at temporary monitors. The pilot program was launched by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Forest Service.

Clearly, we're all pretty tired of being indoors in 2020, but smoky air reduces the dog walks to shorter ones so that we don't end up both sick and tired. Hopefully the forecasts suggesting cleaner air by mid-week bear out. 

However, the fact is, we haven't even hit October yet. It's always a good time to refresh emergency preparedness kits and go-bags. And now you have data resources for air quality at your fingertips. 

When it comes to smoky air, it's pretty intuitive, but worth stating, that the the negative health impacts we avoid are the same for all living creatures, including our animals. It's important to be mindful of the particulates in the air not only for our own health, but the health of our pets.