February 7, 2009
Unhealthy air arrives in the northeast
As Meloë and Patricia noted in their posts on Thursday and Friday, the haze that was in the US Southeast this week has arrived. We've been running our lidar at UMBC since Friday evening and Ruben will post some images later. In addition to blogging, everyone is helping him out in getting a continuous run through the weekend.
The source of the problem is the plethora of fires in the US Southeast. The panels below show the plume coming off the east coast of the US from the MODIS fire locations note on this Google Earth composite. In the right panel, I've zoomed in on a few of these fires on the South Carolina coast.
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These fires don't show up on the USDA Active Fire Maps although that site is now only updating on Fridays. But they are real. In the two panels below, I've zoomed in on two fires in Florida (left, near Jacksonville, and right, a fire further south that wasn't even identified in MODIS).
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This leads to a spectacularly hazy animation from GASP (left) and the AIRNOW readings in the northeast which are in the "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups" range at several sites.
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Finally, here are two PM2.5 time series from Keene, NH and Harrisburg, PA. Both are in the UHG range today. Baltimore is fortunately still in the moderate range with PM readings under 30 ug m-3.
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