May 6, 2012
Smoke across N and S Florida; Isolated moderate levels in midwest
Several fires are burning across Florida and near Lake Okeechobee a smoke plume is moving north and elevating the AQI over Belle Glade, Florida (left). In Northern Florida, smoke plumes are seen north of Orlando and west of Jacksonville.
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The smoke plume moving up through Texas from the Caribbean reported yesterday has backed off a bit. There are isolated moderate AQI readings through the prairies but the smoke plume is not identifiable from satellites.
In California, the southland has a number of stations that have moderate AQI PM readings. The one orange reading in Santa Barbara County is the station discussed a few months ago that was installed because of a blowing sand and dust problem (see left image). On the right, the problem is the sensor not the atmosphere. The blue swath through the TERRA MODIS imager is getting worse on the very east of each swath. It is practically making the MODIS RGB from Terra useless. We will shortly, however, have new imagery coming out from the NPP VIIRS imager. We expect those feeds to be available by next fall.
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