September 21, 2008
Smoke from Oregon is still moving east and northward
Over the last few days, we have been tracking an extensive smoke plume which originated on the 17th in Oregon from the Rattle Fire. We have not talked a great deal about the PyroCb Yahoo News Group organized by Mike Fromm. Last week Mike identified a large plume from the Rattle fire in Oregon and they tracked the plume from Oregon to the northeast over Alberta.
The following four panels below show the MODIS trajectories produced from IDEA from the 17th to the 20th.
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This long range transport has led us to where we are tonight with optical depths over 0.5 through much of the lower Great Lakes. There is a high pressure area centered on southern Ontario and it is moving only slowly. We expect some of this haze to move eastward over Maryland in the next few days. The recirculation is taking the haze over Canada again and the Ontario and Halifax lidar groups should be looking for elevated smoke.
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Finally, CALIPSO has seen this haze in the vertical and the plume is extended between 3-10 km on September 19. In the top panel, the CALIPSO backscatter profile is shown with elevated haze from 40-50oN. The lower panel shows the aerosol feature mask at the same location (orange feature).
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