Cooley Fire in Mendocino County grows to 1,000 acres

A weekend of wildfires up and down California and tonight a wildfire is causing poor air quality for parts of the North Bay after a prescribed burn jumps its containment lines. This is KTVU Fox 2 News at 6. And good evening everyone I'm Mike Meebeck. The Cooley fire started a couple days ago and since then firefighters have been battling the flames from the ground in the air. It is burning right in the area of Elkhorn Road and Cooley Ranch Road west of Cloverdale just north of the Sonoma County line officials say it started Friday afternoon when a control burn right near Lake Sonoma got out of control more than a thousand acres have since burned containment did increase today that's a positive it's now at 15 percent firefighters have been using night flying choppers in this battle Cal Fire as smoke from the wildfire is visible really throughout portions of Lake Mendocino Napa and Sonoma counties contributing to that poor air quality KTVU Chief Meteorologist Mark DeMille here now with a look at those conditions. Mark? Hi there, Mike. Yeah, a lot of fire activity leading to that, to smoke production impacting parts of the North Bay. We have a camera situated in the North Bay in the Geyserville area. This was the view from earlier this morning. Picking up on some of that haze. And I did see Santa Rosa, the airport, the Sonoma County Airport, reporting some haze in their observations from around 9 o'clock this morning to about 3:30 into the afternoon hours. In terms of the air quality advisory, in fact, this is a live camera in the fire zone. showing you the smoke right now. So the air quality advisory continues, especially up in the North Bay. As we take a look at these particular air quality sensors, not too bad, but in your neighborhood could be a different story with maybe some yellows and oranges, especially if you are closer to the fire zone. As far as the smoke forecast model, it really picks up on that smoke up in the North Bay, and it tries to lift it to the north eventually as we take this into the Monday forecast. But we could still have some lingering haze right around the fire zone so here's a look the wider view of the location of this fire up in southern Mendocino County close to the border of Sonoma County so there's Cloverdale becoming closer right now and some of the the current observations right now ranging from 69 to 74 degrees we do have more of an onshore breeze so that's good news but still it is a bit breezy out there winds out of the west gusting to right around 19 miles an hour those moisture levels The humidity levels will be going up, though, later on tonight into tomorrow morning. So that should be a good change. As we take a look at the fire zone forecast, as we put this into motion, this is tomorrow morning. You'll see temperatures back down to the 40s overnight. Those moisture levels are really up there. There will be a breeze that will complicate the firefight. You can see winds at around 15 to maybe 23 miles an hour tomorrow afternoon. But we are scaling back on the heat. We're scaling back on those dry offshore winds. and eventually we could be talking about some shower chances moving into the Bay Area not for tomorrow but to later in the week we're gonna have more on that coming up in a few minutes all right we'll see you soon mark thank you now to southern california