Showing off two photos taken in 2021 from an air quality monitoring station atop the M Resort, Clark County Department of Environment and Sustainability director Marci Henson presented two very different views of Las Vegas.
In one, the buildings ahead were clear and full of color. In the other, taken four days before, even a trained eye couldn’t make them out through a heavy layer of gray smoke that blew in from three concurrent wildfires in Southern California.
Henson, along with U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., and officials from the Desert Research Institute and Western Regional Climate Center, displayed the images Monday while celebrating a $1 million grant that will help Nevadans get faster, more precise information about what to expect from nearby wildfires.
“What these two images remind us is that wildfire smoke knows no boundaries,” Henson said. “A fire burning hundreds of miles away can darken our skies and threaten our health within a number of days. This project is Nevada and DRI’s response to that challenge.”
The project will allow researchers to vastly improve current modeling by coupling on-the-ground observations that agencies already have with data from NASA satellites, experts said.
In an age of uncontrolled wildfire, better predictions are a boon to public health, especially in the Las Vegas Valley, which ranked 12th for the worst air quality of any metro area in the country last year, according to the American Lung Association.
“Wildfire itself is not going away,” said Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center. “It’s been here for a very long time, but what we can do is mitigate the impacts of that on communities.”
Titus: ‘Climate deniers’ in Congress pushed back
The money funding this project, Titus said, comes from an appropriations request she carried forward this year. With a Republican majority that is often skeptical about climate science and the Trump administration’s push to reel in federal spending, the grant was hard-won, she said.
“It’s very hard to get funding these days,” Titus said.“There are still climate deniers in terms of how this is going to impact increased smoke, increase fire, increased heat, increased costs. In Congress, you’ve got to convince people that it is a danger and that it is worth funding.”
U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, Nevada’s lone Republican in Congress, voted in favor of the appropriations bill.
Titus said to think of the money as an investment in the health of Nevadans, rather than as an expenditure.
“When it gets here, DRI, spend it, because we don’t want them to take it back,” Titus added.
Brown, whose center will put the grant to use, said it could be a year or more before Nevadans notice a difference in air quality projections from their local agencies, such as Clark County. For now, his focus is on getting the models right first.
The models that will be created from the partnership with NASA scientists can be applied widely, Brown said.
“Even though our initial focus will be here in Nevada, what gets developed is something that can work with and be utilized, really, in any geographic region,” he said.
Henson said she hopes Clark County can use the models to prepare for wildfire events that leaders are often blindsided by — the impacts of the 2021 Southern California fires shown in the photos being a chief example.
“We’ve had a hard time predicting with a level of certainty that’s helpful to the public how we’re going to be influenced by wildfire,” she said. “There are gaps there in our science. This project that DRI is undertaking is going to help fill a lot of those gaps.”
Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.
