Wildfire smoke
2022-09-09 Boise City, ID wildfire smoke episode
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 60.6 µg/m³ near Boise City across 1 covered metro home to 845,877 people.
Counting the extra PM2.5 above each metro's typical day, this event handed the average affected resident ≈ 2.4 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 2.1 million cigarettes. An awareness illustration of outdoor exposure at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette (Berkeley Earth), counting only the event's ranked days; not a medical dose.
Episode peak
-- cigarettes
The smoke map's scale, replayed over this event: the surface interpolates between covered metros' daily records, framed to the affected region. Hover for a reading, click a metro to pin it to the card. Days a monitor did not report draw nothing.
What happened, in the record
Qualified supplied evidence supports wildfire smoke as the root cause of this event. The supplied record does not establish a coherent shared occurrence with neighboring candidates, so the episode remains event-specific.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boise City, ID | 60.6 µg/m³ | 2.8 | Sep 9, 2022 | #14 of its top days |
"Cigarettes, whole event" totals a metro's ranked event days at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette: what a person outdoors there breathed across the event, as the illustration. "All-time standing" is where this episode's days sit in each metro's ranked record (worst-area measure, since 1999). Full local context is on each metro's Air Records page.
The evidence
EPA AQS monitor qualifier 2
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier RT — Wildfire-U. S. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (RT, Wildfire-U. S.) on 1 PM2.5 sample in the candidate CBSA on 2022-09-09, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the sample. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier IT — Wildfire-U. S. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted informational qualifier (IT, Wildfire-U. S.) on 120 PM2.5 samples in the candidate CBSA on 2022-09-09, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the samples. An informational qualifier is an official submitting-agency flag, not a request for exclusion or an EPA-concurred determination.
NWS Air Quality Alert 1
- Air Quality Alert AQABOI An archived NWS Air Quality Alert for Boise City, ID, issued 2022-09-09T17:20Z, explicitly identifies wildfire smoke. IEM is the archive, not the official system of record.
Agency and publisher pages 1
- Idaho issues air quality advisory issued for Boise area Contemporaneous local reporting identifies wildfire smoke as the reason for poor Boise-area air quality and the advisory.
What remains uncertain
- Agency-submitted AQS qualifiers support attribution but do not by themselves establish EPA concurrence.
Status and provenance
Research preview: this record carries research-only status and its boundaries, cause, and name may change as evidence review completes. Grouping policy common_sense_root_cause_grouping.v2. The cause label reflects the assembled evidence above, not an IAQng detection formula.