The 37,000 or so people going to Bronco Stadium for the much anticipated Boise State/BYU football game should expect a more baseball-like weather night.
The temperature inside Bronco Stadium at the 7 p.m. kickoff should be in the low 70s and is expected to drop to the mid 60s by the second half after the sun goes down, according to National Weather Service reports. Winds will be light, between 5-to-10 mph, so it should be a pleasant night to sit in the stands.
Thanks to a massive plume of smoke from 40,000 acre Wenatchee wildfire complex in Washington posting up over the Treasure Valley Thursday, the high in Boise never got close to the predicted high of 85 degrees — only reaching as high as 79 by around 4 p.m., according to National Weather Service reports.
Boise endured one of the smokiest days of the year Thursday — which is saying something in the 2012 summer of smoke — but the air quality remained in the moderate range all day as that smoke stayed up high in the atmosphere.
The smoke never really cleared away and the sun never really broke through. The gloom just got brighter as the day progressed.
At 10 a.m. Thursday, there was so much smoke in the upper atmosphere over the Treasure Valley the sun resembled an orange dot in the sky instead of the blazing hammer it normally is on most summer mornings.
At 10 a.m. visibility at the Boise Airport was only three miles, according to National Weather Service reports. By 5 p.m., visibility was at four miles.
The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality registered a yellow (moderate) air quality day in the Treasure Valley Thursday and has predicted another yellow air quality day for Friday.
Even though the air in Boise looked like it was imported from London Thursday morning, a DEQ monitoring station at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center measured a 82 air quality index (AQI) rating for pollutants, which puts air quality right in the yellow range, at 9 a.m. That same monitor measured an 89 (AQI) at 3 p.m..
The air quality is worse in other parts of the state, especially those areas closes to major wildfires.
The Idaho City area registered a orange AQI rating of 112 at 8 a.m., which puts the air quality in the “unhealthy for sensitive groups” range as firefighters continue to battle the Karney Fire. At 3 p.m., the AQI was at 144.
Like many days this summer, Treasure Valley residents should be thankful they don’t live in Ketchum or McCall, which had orange AQI rating Thursdays, or Salmon, which had purple AQI rating, which means the air is very unhealthy for everyone.
