The air quality is terrible again today, but there is a bit of improvement ahead to end the week. The longer-term concern will be the control of fires in the Northwestern U.S. and Canada and how much smoke improvement we may see in our sky.

Let's start with the smoke forecast. I've overlaid fire locations indicated with red triangles. The thickest smoke is in the yellow shades. This animation runs through the next two days.

We can see some thinning of that smoke over Colorado's skies into Friday morning, but there is plenty upstream that can quickly return. Out of the next few days, barring a new fire somewhere, Saturday may have some much "nicer" air quality.

Rain showers and thunderstorms will clear the sky a bit, although the raindrops drying on your cars will leave plenty of smoke spots. For the metro areas, the most likely time for rain is later on Friday. Here's an animation for the state first, followed by an hourly timeline for Denver.

As the hourly planner shows, the chance of rain is sadly below 50%. It'd be nice to clear the air and get as much water as possible now. Why? Next week looks rather hot and mostly dry.

We will be back soon with an update on next week's heat. Have a good one.