February 3, 2008
Temperatures rise and air quality falls in Northeast
Liberty/Clairton and the Susquehanna River PM2.5 site are in the unhealthy range at AQI's of147 and 117, respectively. Lancaster peaked at 62.9 ug/m3 this afternoon. The visibility in Baltimore shows the elevated particulate levels:
 |
There are also a few other PM2.5 sites in the US that are into the unhealthy range today. Waterloo, Iowa, is one of them.
 |
And there is one pretty plume visible from space from the northeast entrance to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel at the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula:
 |
A rough estimate puts the plume shadow at 10 km north of the plume. Since this was an AQUA image at 2:30 pm, the solar zenith angle was 62 degrees. Simple trigonometry puts the plume at 5 km altitude which is too high to be a fire and likely just a contrail.