U.S. Air Quality

Smoke over the US and Canada. First signs of Canadian Smoke over Baltimore

Clear skies prevailed throughout most of ELF's operation today, with an occasional cloud advecting over UMBC, as shown in the lidar timeseries (left figure). The boundary layer was homogeneous and extended up to 1.6 km. The layer aloft between 5 and 6 km is smoke from the Canadian fires that we have discussed since Saturday. The origin of this layer aloft was confirmed by overlaying in Google Earth (right figure) the NOAA HYSPLIT backtrajectories and the Hazard Mapping System Fire and Smoke Product. The smoke plumes are from last Saturday's HMS smoke product and the red, blue and green lines are the result of a 96 hour backtrajectory analysis of today's airmass between 5-6 km over UMBC, that show that it originated in the area of heavy smoke over Canada. Elastic lidars (355 and 527 nm) will be operating overnight to monitor the temporal evolution of this smoke layer.

Today's NOAA's Hazard Mapping System Fire and Smoke Product shows that the smoke originating from large fires burning in central and southern California, Utah, northeastern Oregon, and southwestern Canada (southern British Columbia) had combined into one large mass which spread eastward and covered a good portion of the US and Southern Canada. The high readings in today's MODIS Terra (left figure) and AQUA (right figure) AOD retrieval over the US and Canada are due to smoke from the fires discussed above.

Regarding the California wildfires, the National Interagency Fire Center reports that the Morris, Red Rocks, and Pendleton fires are 95, 85, and 70% contained, respectively. The smoke is still visible, as shown in today's MODIS AQUA RGB true color image. Air Quality ranged between MODERATE to UNHEALTHY levels as smoke settled into the valleys of Los Angeles County. Ground concentrations as high as 110 ppb and 110 ug/m3 for ozone (below left) and PM2.5 (below right), respectively, were recorded by the monitors of the South Coast Air Quality Management District according to Airnowtech.

Posted by Ruben Delgado at September 2, 2009 11:24 PM