You didn’t need an app to know something was wrong. In vivid oranges and yellows, the skies over New York City this summer—the result of Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles away—repeated a stark truth about our changing climate: the impacts of wildfires and other natural disasters are growing more intense, and even at a distance, it’s getting harder to escape them. To Build a New Pollution Map, the US Turned to Thousands of Volunteers Still, an array of apps and geospatial data are helping Americans better understand their air, whatever color it is, and plan accordingly. Public health officials are increasingly interested, too. Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified that people with asthma or other cardiovascular conditions, as well as poorer communities, elderly people, and those working outdoors, face the highest risk from air that’s heavy in fine particulate matter (PM) and 24 The sky over New York City turned orange in June 2023 due to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
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