If you looked up at the sky this week and saw a grey, drab haze, you are not alone. Large parts of Canada saw air quality dip as wildfire smoke from the Prairies made its way to central Canada.

But experts say forecasting wildfire smoke can be quite challenging.

For starters, predicting wildfire smoke is linked to predicting the weather, which is already a tall task, said University of Montreal chemistry professor Patrick Hayes.

“You need to have good observations, and then those observations are then used in a computer simulation with essentially fundamental physical equations to predict the weather,” he said.

“But if the observations aren’t complete, you don’t have a complete picture, so then it’s hard to predict weather. And if we can’t predict the weather, it’s also hard to als

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