March 7, 2009
Ditto.
Amy's comprehensive post yesterday pretty much captures where we are today. There is still extensive moderate air quality in the US midwest and northeast, however, now it is under cloud and we don't have a good view from space of what is going on there.
MODISToday seems stuck on Friday and has no data today so the images below are from NOAA IDEA. Left and right are MODIS's AOD readings from Terra in the morning and Aqua in the afternoon. Below that is the GASP loop. You can see that the haze in the southeast is streaming offshore and heading eastward. There also is indication of haze in the upper San Joaquin valley near Sacramento.
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The GASP animation above took a while to load because it is large and has multiple .gifs. We are in the process of thinking through how GASP will evolve to the GOES-R satellite platform over the next few years. We will be changing the IDEA platform to absorb the new GOES-R data when it is available and developing algorithms to extract the movement you see in the image above into vectors of pollution movement in a near-real-time "nowcasting" system.
Weekly Summary: The week started with a major storm over the east coast and by Tuesday, fires (both wild and prescribed) were burning widely throughout the south. Oklahoma and Georgia are the leaders in the fire counts and Oklahoma's air quality decreased to moderate by midweek.