January 13, 2008
Fire in Louisiana and unhealthy air quality in Bakersfield
Two areas of unhealthy particulate air quality today, West Palm Beach FL and Bakersfield CA. In West Palm Beach, the readings were poor for a short period this afternoon and during a period that a thunderstorm was moving through the area. It is possible the poor air quality was associated with a gust front.
In Louisiana, the MODIS Terra image (here in GoogleEarth format) shows a fire which is southwest of New Orleans. The fire was also there in the Aqua MODIS overpass this afternoon. In the Aqua image two other fires are apparent and this looks to be intentional burning. Also of note in the NOAA HMS fire map is that there are fires in Alberta, Canada. That certainly is not expected there this time of year.
 |  |
Bakersfield is the real air quality story today. The MODIS Terra image is shown in the left panel at about 10:10 PST this morning and the Aqua image is at 2:50 PST this afternoon. The morning fog in Terra and haze in Aqua blanketing the lower valley is very apparent. The only AERONET site in the south valley at Fresno is showing that the area is cloud covered. Yesterday, Kern County restricted all wood burning and today it is "discouraged". Forecast is clearing tomorrow with higher winds and clear through Tuesday and then back into fog for the rest of next week.
 |  |
Re: fires burning in Alberta at this time of the year. I agree that it is certainly unexpected and looking out my window I see none. Snow is not flammable. I suspect that the image is picking up flaring from oil & gas operations. If so, the gas fields in the lower 48 would also appear as fires. ,b
Posted by: Doug Hird at January 14, 2008 6:00 PMDoug,
Thanks for the ground-truthing! I have a friend in Calgary who said it was dry and warm this year but I didn't think it was that dry or that warm.
If you look at Jill's Saturday post, though, you see increased NO2 in Alberta. Clearly, flaring operations produce heat (which is what NOAA is mapping) and NO2 (which is what OMI measures). An interesting, if speculative, observation. We will have to drill down to high resolution to see if the two are spatially correlated and make sense with respect to the natural gas operations.
Thanks again for the ground-truth.
Posted by: Ray Hoff at January 14, 2008 6:21 PM