June 15, 2008
Smoke continues in east, midwest and north; high ozone in California
I'm struggling a bit with our data sources today. AIRNow Particles maps are off-line. AIRNow has been doing some upgrades in the last two weeks and maybe they will recover later today.
In the meantime, the HMS smoke analysis shows three major areas of smoke across the country. In the right image, smoke is visible over western Nebraska and it continues across Nebraska in the Aqua image. That smoke appears to be from the Humboldt fire in northern California over the last couple of days.
 |  |
Aqua's image of the California Fire:
 |
We've not made a lot of use of CALIPSO's expedited images on this site. CALIPSO is a spaceborne lidar flying in the same orbit as Aqua and about 15 minutes behind Aqua in time. On June 11 and June 14, the nighttime passes of CALIPSO passed near North Carolina (approximately 30N, 75W) and the smoke plume is clearly visible in both images on the right hand side of each image.
There was discussion this week of these fires getting to high altitude but both CALIPSO cross sections place the smoke well below 5 km.
 |
Note: Chieko Kittaka also sent this image around on pyroCb's List.
 |