Note that vertically integrated smoke includes high-altitude smoke so it might not reflect air quality near the surface. Use near surface smoke to see how bad the air will be to breathe. Indeed, it looks like a sea breeze is currently keeping near surface smoke out of some parts of the Bay Area.
There are also several sites that repackage the NOAA smoke forecast data in friendlier (and/or faster loading) visualizations.
E.g., https://www.sfchronicle.com/air-quality superimposes wind, and also toggles between smoke forecast and real time PM2.5 measurements from the PurpleAir sensor network.
Pretty good tool. I use Zoom earth, you can see the areas that are thick with smoke. Sometimes it's hard to tell with cloud cover happening at the same time. So you can pair up those two and get a good picture of what's happening now.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] threadedit: another great visualization https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/sector_band.php?sat=G1...
E.g., https://www.sfchronicle.com/air-quality superimposes wind, and also toggles between smoke forecast and real time PM2.5 measurements from the PurpleAir sensor network.
[0] https://fire.airnow.gov
Having compared a bunch of different smoke forecasts over this time period, its hard to say which ones are better than the others.
It’s a startling visualization.