PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) – Wednesday morning, the National Weather Service issued Air Quality alerts for our region.

The smoke from the Canadian wildfires has been creeping south and affecting areas to our north over the last couple of days. Today… it’s our turn. The haze was thick. You could smell the smoke as you walked out the door. It looked like fog on the tower cams.

The entire state of North Carolina is under an air quality alert Wednesday because of the smoke concentration from the Canadian wildfires.

The smoke will be thick in the Hampton Roads region Wednesday. It will definitely affect asthma sufferers, people with COPD, and those with other breathing problems. I feel like my allergies are kicking in myself.

It will be best for those folks to stay indoors today. They may want to run an air filter if they have them. Definitely keep the windows closed, and let the air conditioning filters do their job. There may be some rain showers today that could clean out the air a little. The showers will be happening along a cold front that might stall out for a bit.

Here’s a look at the current air quality index in our region.

The front will slowly drop to the south through the day. It will create some scattered showers through the late morning.

These will move out for a time. Then we’ll have more scattered showers, along with a few thunderstorms, from this afternoon into the early evening.

We may even have a couple of heavy downpours during the evening commute. The front, clouds, and scattered showers will act to drop the temperatures compared to yesterday. High temps will aim for the mid 70s.

It’s possible that these features could even keep the temps more in the lower 70s today. We’ll see. Hopefully, the rain showers will clean out the smoke in the air by tomorrow. The forecast is optimistic about this, but I am not as much. Otherwise, we should have a decent day tomorrow. We’ll have partly cloudy skies with only some isolated showers possible. High temps will be in the upper 70s, but there will be less humidity.

The weather looks great for the weekend. We’ll be partly cloudy on Friday with highs in the upper 70s to near 80. We’ll be near 80 and partly cloudy on Saturday. Then we’ll be mostly sunny with mid 80s on Sunday. Hopefully, the smoke doesn’t return and put a damper on things. We’ll see. Stay tuned for updates.

The Atlantic is quiet for now, but there is a non-tropical area of low pressure in the eastern Atlantic (near the Azores) that has a low chance of becoming tropical or subtropical for a time.

Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler