August 5, 2009
Transport of smoke over UMBC from British Columbia fires
MPL and ELF were running since yesterday and here is a layer of smoke over University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) as seen by our MPL. ELF ran overnight but MPL experienced an unsucessfully auto-reboot, therefore we lost data after 11 p.m. of yesterday (local time). The first image shows the smoke seen in the late afternoon yesterday (very end of the plot around 14km).
From NOAA HYSPLIT a 96 hours backtrajectory from UMBC shows that the smoke has likely been transported from the southern British Columbia fires and maybe with some contribution from the Alaska fires as well. The second image is the back trajectory overlaid in true color MODIS Terra images from yesterday on Google Earth. The red line shows the back trajectory at 14 km of altitude, blue and green are 11 km and 5 km respectively.
The original HYSPLIT image is here.
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