U.S. Air Quality

Fires cause raised AOD in western Florida. Smoke from Mexico moving North.

The first image below, courtesy NOAA HMS, shows the fire locations across the United States. The red dots correspond to active fires, and the grey areas are plumes. The largest plumes are surrounding the western portion of Florida and Texas. The wildfire plumes appear to be moving northward from the large fires in Mexico right now, which do not appear on the HMS image. The second image below shows the EPA AIRNOW AQI values for California. There are forecasted code oranges and yellows in this region. Some of this may be from smoke moving northward, but there also appears to be dust moving in from the west (see NAAPS below).

The animation below shows the GASP AOD for the region surrounding the southeast of the country. This helps to quantify the optical depth from these smoke plumes that have originated on the panhandle of Florida. Large clouds over Texas today made AOD retrievals difficult. The next image, courtesy NAAPS aerosol model, shows a large dust plume moving in from the west, large amounts of smoke coming from Mexico, and sulfates across the northeast.