August 17, 2008
Still Persistent
Nikisa called the smoke in California and Canada persistent. Persistence in forecasting has a special meaning. Generally, it is the principle that the weather tomorrow has a tendency to be like the weather today. Until computer forecast models were improved in the 1990's, persistence was a hard forecasting tool to beat. Persistence was right about 70% of the time and the models were right even less. Now, however, forecast models are much better than persistence and we tend to put more faith in them.
But persistence in the fires in North America (left panel) is clearly at work. Since the fires are not being put out, we continue to have air quality problems associated with two major fire areas: the Trinity fires in Northern California (right panel) and the Canadian Nunavut fires seen in the left image at 60oN.
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Nikisa identified a plume of smoke from the Canadian fires coming through Saskatchewan and Ontario in yesterday's post. Today that smoke is widespread across the Great Lakes (left image below). In addition, new fires are burning in Idaho (right image).
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The fires are a significant factor in the air quality at the surface (the PM2.5 concentrations are very unhealthy in northern California today (AIRNow particles loop, left panel). And if that were not insult enough to California, ozone is in the unhealthy range in San Bernadino and in the Mohave Desert of California (right image).
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Finally, (and I apologize for this busy post, but there is a lot going on) the two CALIPSO overpasses over Canada on Saturday show elevated smoke from the Canadian fires at up to 8 km (circled in red), but two spectacular plumes in the stratosphere from the Kasatochi volcanic eruption (circled in yellow). NOAA has a wonderful collection of column SO2 from the volcano showing much of the northern hemisphere being affected from this eruption.
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And to try your patience with one more curiousity: I pointed these two fires out before in a post some months ago but they are here again today (pardon the poor quality of the MODIS image) but the location of those fires is the Texaco Refinery in Nanticoke, Ontario. Impressive that MODIS can see the heat from the flaring in the refinery.
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