U.S. Air Quality

CA and MT fires continue to spread smoke eastward; in China we can see smog from space

The California fires near Siskayou National Forest and the Cascade Fires in Montana continue to burn with over 10k acres in each set of fires. The smoke from these fires are tracking in roughly the same direction through the Dakotas, sinking southward over Nebraska,Iowa and Missouri in the Terra MODIS look and now there is a pulse of smoke in southern Indiana and Kentucky.

On Friday, CALIPSO passed twice over the California fire complex near 40^oN. The top image is daytime and the bottom image is nighttime and points out the significantly better signal to noise that CALIPSO has at night. In the far, not-so-white north, significant fire plumes are extended across the Canadian Arctic (left of bottom image).

The IDEA site has the current MODIS Terra AOD and it shows a strong plume of smoke heading ENE across Oregon. We can expect to see these aerosols feeding the east for a while yet.

Over China, the cloud system has moved away and we can start to see the surface near Beijing again. Thanks to the Rapidfire folks for adding a number of subsets to this part of China. With the ability to output these subsets into .kmz files, we can add locations so that you can see that Beijing is now being affected by haze coming from the southwest. There is significant haze in the Zhengzhou area to the south and X'ian to the west and if this moves towards Beijing, it will get hazier even with the pollution controls in place. Our colleagues Pucai Wang and Zhanqing Li are running a nearly live Aeronet site in Xianghe, which is right in the hazy area. Yesterday (August 3, there), the haze got to an AOD of over 2 and the start of today (August 4, there) looks hazier.

Posted by Ray Hoff at August 3, 2008 8:15 PM