June 18, 2008
Smoke in eastern North Carolina and Southeastern Virginia
The smoke from the fires in North Carolina and Southeastern VA was more confined over the ocean and
eastern portions of both states today. However, there is still thick smoke visible all along eastern North Carolina in today's true color imagery (left, UW MODIS Aqua RGB in the background, MODIS fire locations shown in symbols, and EPA AIRNow AQI in colored circles). The fire in the Dismal Swamp (in Southeastern VA and northeastern North Carolina) is also still active and caused pollution and visibility problems last week and early this week (see Amy's post from Monday) in Southeastern Virginia. Click here for the Recent Daily Press articles of the Dismal Swamp Lake fires . Meanwhile, clear skies in southern California (top right) contributed to code orange and code red conditions. The fire in central California, near Monterey is also still causing a visible smoke plume. Sunglint makes it hard to discern the smoke due to that fire over the pacific, so check the NOAA HMS analysis for more exact location (bottom left). The HMS analysis also shows Canadian smoke drifting into the north-central US but does not appear to be affecting surface PM2.5 concentrations.
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Finally, high ozone led to code red (unhealthy air quality) conditions in Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.
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I am an air quality forecaster with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. In the process of producing our daily forecast and reading the Smog Blog, I noticed there was a sentence stating: "Finally, high ozone led to code red (unhealthy air quality) conditions in Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta" for June 18th. In actuality, although Atlanta did reach a code orange for the 8-hr average, it did not reach a code red.
Posted by: Nyasha Dunkley at June 20, 2008 3:34 PMHi Nyasha,
At the time I was posting, AIRNow reported code red conditions and the circles in color on the map are from a data file I downloaded from AIRNow and then opened and saved from Google Earth. Perhaps when the AQI was recalculated with the actual average ozone concentrations later it went down to the orange ranage ? Thanks for your input !!
Ana