Wildfire smoke
2000-11-01 wildfire smoke episode affecting Birmingham-Hoover, AL, Chattanooga, TN-GA
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 71.6 µg/m³ near Chattanooga across 2 covered metros home to 1.8 million people. 2 metros placed a top-ten day in their record.
Counting the extra PM2.5 above each metro's typical day, this event handed the average affected resident ≈ 3.8 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 6.8 million cigarettes. An awareness illustration of outdoor exposure at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette (Berkeley Earth), counting only the event's ranked days; not a medical dose.
Episode peak
-- cigarettes
The smoke map's scale, replayed over this event: the surface interpolates between covered metros' daily records, framed to the affected region. Hover for a reading, click a metro to pin it to the card. Days a monitor did not report draw nothing.
What happened, in the record
Qualified frozen causal evidence supports wildfire smoke as the broad root cause.
Sequence: Birmingham (Nov 1) → Chattanooga (Nov 2)
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chattanooga, TN-GA | 71.6 µg/m³ | 3.3 | Nov 2, 2000 | #3 of its top days |
| Birmingham-Hoover, AL | 62.2 µg/m³ | 5.5 | Nov 2, 2000 | #7 of its top days |
"Cigarettes, whole event" totals a metro's ranked event days at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette: what a person outdoors there breathed across the event, as the illustration. "All-time standing" is where this episode's days sit in each metro's ranked record (worst-area measure, since 1999). Full local context is on each metro's Air Records page.
The evidence
EPA AQS monitor qualifier 1
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier E — Forest Fire. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (E, Forest Fire.) on 1 PM2.5 sample in the candidate CBSA on 2000-11-02, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the sample. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
What remains uncertain
- AQS qualifiers are submitting-agency causal flags and do not by themselves establish EPA concurrence.
Status and provenance
Research preview: this record carries research-only status and its boundaries, cause, and name may change as evidence review completes. Grouping policy common_sense_root_cause_grouping.v2. The cause label reflects the assembled evidence above, not an IAQng detection formula.