Smoke from California's catastrophic wildfires is spreading across the country to New York City, a National Weather Service model shows. The particles are about a mile above the surface and will generally not affect air quality on the ground.
California is presently dealing with three of the state's 30 largest fires on record. The Mendocino Complex Fire, now encompassing more than 300,000 acres, is California's largest fire ever.
"The trends are pretty astounding in terms of the number of acres burned, the length of the wildfire season, the numbers of structures lost," Kelly Pohl, a research analyst with Headwaters Economics, told The New York Times. "If you look at the trends over several decades, they've all gone up."
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California has spent more than half of its annual fire budget in a span of just 40 days.
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