March 15, 2009
Elevated aerosol concentrations through the midwest and lakes states
Yesterday, the HMS system identified clusters of fires throughout Oklahoma and Kansas and more are seen today. We have elevated PM in Chicago although the haze is not readily visible in the RGB images. It does show up in the GASP AOD loop of EPA Region 5(right).
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The flow from the IDEA streamlines show a low pressure area over the southern Prairie provinces coupled with a weak high over the east, leading to enhanced flow from the south (TX, AR, OK,KS, MO) up through the lower great lakes. As an explanation, due to a decision at NOAA, we are moving to replace the forward trajectories on the IDEA nowcasting panel with streamflows from the NOAA NWS NCEP model and aerosol motion vectors from GOES imagery. This should be up in a few weeks. We can see that the seasons are changing as ozone is forecasted by NOAA to be high over the high plains.
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The Naval Postgraduate School's forecast system is still calling for dust to arrive in the US west over the next few days. The forecast shows that the haze in the east has a significant sulfate component with 8 μg m-3 over PA. We are running a continuous sulfate analyzer at UMBC and will be watching this over the next 72 hours. 