May 30, 2010
Poor air quality in the Great Lakes States; Fires in Quebec; Pacaya volcano in Guatemala
Air quality in the Great Lakes region was very poor today, showing moderate levels of PM2.5 (top, left) that persisted throughout the day in most of the states and unhealthy levels of ozone (for sensitive groups) in Wisconsin, bordering Lake Michigan and also in Ohio.
The rest of the eastern US is still experiences good to moderate air quality, specially Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma, eastern Texas, Missouri and Iowa. Southern California also had moderate levels of PM2.5 and Ozone (top, right).
Moderate to unhealthy levels PM2.5 was also observed in Canada, in the vicinity of the recent fires in Quebec.
For tomorrow AIRNow forecasts code orange in NJ and code red in Maine and Quebec.
True color image and AOD of the upper portion of the eastern US from MODIS Aqua and the fires and smoke/aerosol reported by the HMS team at NOAA are below, respectively.
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The fires in Quebec could be observed with MODIS Aqua today, which showed many distinct fire spots very close together (left). AOD (right) was higher in that region, and from AIRNow recordings we can see that it is already starting to affect local air quality.
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Last but certainly not least, the volcano Pacaya, which is the most active among the 32 volcanoes in Guatemala, started erupting on Thursday afternoon and at least a couple of casualties have already been reported. On the top of the chaos caused by the eruption came a tropical storm - Agatha - raising the death toll to almost 100.
A true color image of the eruption was not possible due to the cloud coverage caused by the storm, but OMI shows us the SO2 column (5km).
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