U.S. Air Quality

Fire in the Arctic?

It's Christmas Day and the Boss pulled duty for blogging today. I'll have the Air Quality Blog up this afternoon but I thought anyone who is too bored today to drink eggnog and open presents might take a quick look at USAQ.

I found the following image on our friends at Rapidfire's site.

The white space above is because the image is in the high Arctic and it is dark up there this time of year. We only get data from the visible channels in the southern part of the image. But I wondered what the red dot was doing there. This is from the infrared channels which detect fires. It is pretty cold up there this time of year so nothing should be burning. I zoomed in.

This reminded me of flying into Resolute on a C-130 on Christmas Eve, 1995. As we approached Resolute out of the dark, you could see in the distance the runway lights amidst all the blackness of the Arctic Night. The Canadian Forces Pilot called out "there's the Christmas Tree". He meant that the runway lights looked like a Christmas tree.

We don't have the pixel resolution from our common sources to check this out so I went to a military site this morning to get more data. We don't normally do that. You can find an explanation in an animation(link) on the NORAD (thanks guys!) page which explains what we saw in this picture. If you don't have a media player which allows you to see that video, go here.

Merry Christmas and have a good holiday from the UMBC Air Quality Team!

Posted by Ray Hoff at December 25, 2005 10:30 AM