April 24, 2009
Moderate air quality from Texas to Kansas and around the Great Lakes; South Carolina fires still affecting air quality
Today code yellow in California, around the Great Lakes and also all the way from Texas to Kansas (top, left). A high pressure system this weekend will bring us sunny skies in the East and the EPA forecast is of moderate level of PM's and enhanced ozone formation. For tomorrow "Air Quality Action Days" have been declared to some cities in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Specifically, for Philadelphia there's a forecast of code orange for ozone. Today's ozone levels are displayed in the top,right.
The fires map from the SSD fire team at NOAA is provided bellow (bottom, left) showing Central America still with lots of fire spots, and also a large plume in the Gulf of Mexico and another one spreading out to the Atlantic from South Carolina . With respect to the latter in the right we can clearly see the smoke from the SC fires that burned since yesterday through the night until early today. This picture was taken by Ray Rogers from NASA/LARC and sent to us this morning.
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Not as clearly as in Ray's photograph, Aqua MODIS also shows us the reminiscent smoke (left) and in the right we see the associated higher AOD values from Terra MODIS.
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And last but not least, congrats to our former blogger and recent Dr. Nikisa Jordan !!
Posted by Patricia Sawamura at April 24, 2009 10:24 PM