It’s not just the intense heat that is affecting residents throughout the Foothills this week.
According to the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Calgary area, including Okotoks and High River, will set between moderate and high-risk levels on Tuesday.
The forecast calls for an AQHI reading of 6 which is moderate risk throughout the day before dropping slightly to a 5 for Wednesday.
Meteorologist Brian Proctor says smoke from Alberta and B.C. wildfires is to blame.
“It's sort of been sitting around over top of the Canadian Prairies and directing in from British Columbia as well, really acting in combination with a really significant upper ridge of high pressure, which has caused fairly stable conditions through the atmospheric column,” he said.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to determine how long the AQHI will stay in the moderate range or if it will swing to the high or low ranges.
Proctor did acknowledge though that cooler temperatures and the possibility of less smoke are on the horizon.
“We're getting it more westerly winds developing, a lot coming in from British Columbia, which is likely going to bring smoke from some of the some of the wildfires that are sort of prevalent west of Kamloops and through the Kootenays in that area across,” he said. “We're likely to see less extensive smoke, but we still could get into one of the plumes coming off some of those BC fires.”
Temperatures are forecast to reach 34 and 33 degrees over the next couple days before dropping to as low as 25 by Saturday.
The 30-degree temperatures though could make a return by Monday and carrying on into the first days of August.
As for whether the wildfire smoke could lead to a further cooldown, Proctor said that is hard to forecast, but it is possible.
“The energy coming from the sun, it (smoke) tends to reflect it back into space,” he said.
“It helps to sort of tone those temperatures down slightly. The kind of daytime maxes we've been seeing over the last little while would have been even warmer than they have been if we didn't have all that smoke prevalent in the air.”
However, he notes that the change in termperature from the smoke is only prevalent in the daytime, with little effect on overnight lows.