Currently in Toronto — June 10th, 2022
The weather, currently.
A nice Friday on the way! The disturbance that brought the rain earlier today will exit east, allowing a ridge of high pressure to build in and promoting a dry and pleasant day. Friday morning will be bright, with sunny skies and a wake-up temperature near 14°C. There will be some scattered clouds for the afternoon, but overall a great close to the week. The high 22°C. There will be a moderate breeze from the west 20-40km/h and the UV index will be 8 or very high.
Friday Night: Partly cloudy with a low of 14°C.
Side Note: The next system that moves in is tracking further south of our region now, improving our overall weekend forecast. Saturday should be dry with just a few scattered afternoon showers.
What you need to know, currently.
Los Alamos, New Mexico sits on one of the four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau. It’s a strange town—the birthplace of the atomic bomb laid out as a strip mall, where a storefront labeled “News From Mars” plays slideshows from the rover down the street from a Subway sandwich shop. It’s in the middle of the most beautiful part of the country I’ve ever seen, but it’s also one of two sites in the United States that manufacture plutonium cores for bombs and it’s quite vulnerable to wildfires.
New Mexico’s fire season started early this year. Climate change has contributed to a long term drought in the region, which has been exacerbated by La Niña and in April a prescribed burn at Hermit’s Peak grew beyond firefighters capacity to control. Some of this is because of overactive fire suppression, which has allowed the forests’ undergrowth to turn the woods into a tinderbox.
“Many of these forests, naturally speaking, are adapted to burn,” fire ecologist, Blanca Cespedes, told the New York Times. “Fire suppression policies have allowed us to live in this territory, but also created a forest that is hyper-dense in fuels.”