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Comment by kaesar14 | Hacker News Reader

To my research, SF AQI has never topped 249. New York just topped out at 342 today with no sign of letting up. I won't dispute that SF wildfire season being so frequent and long lasting, there's been nasty periods, but no it's factually incorrect that SF has ever been at one time worse than what's happening in NYC right now.

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I'll admit - looked at the New York ones for today after making this comment and it looked higher than I had seen in SF. I was basing on what I had seen on purpleair yesterday.

e: Although I do remember a few days where I believe it might have broke 300 on purpleair

I double checked my chat messages from when this was happening in SF and it was definitely above 300 on purple air during the 2020 SF fires.

Checking my logs from the CZU Fire Complex back in 2020, the AQI at my house in the SF Peninsula topped out at 766. It was pretty bad.

one of the sensors in SF right now

""" On June 7th, 2023, 4:12:06 PM PDT 10 Minute Average US EPA PM2.5 AQI is now 320 Sensor: Bill Nye the AQI """ https://map.purpleair.com/1/m/i/mAQI/a10/p604800/cC0?select=...

Uh, that's clearly an outlier. None of the other dozens of sensors around it are registering anything higher than 42.

Here's the data for the Bay Area from 2020 - which was considered a particularly bad year for wildfire smoke, and is also the most recent year it's caused particular problems here. Peak levels were only around 200, although it was admittedly somewhat prolonged: https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-air-quality/current-air-quality...

I think this is maybe not directly comparable with purple air, was able to find old chat messages I had sent showing that the AQI in my neighborhood in SF was upwards of 300 on September 11th, 2020

Portland hit well over 500 in 2020, and I believe I remember some peak readings of around 800, but I can't find them now.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/09/portlands-air-qualit...

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