June 12, 2012
Smoke across Central U.S. Ozone causes Code Orange for California. Dust in East CA/West NV
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 central portion of the country and the New England region. The animation below shows the GASP AOD values for the Mid West region. You can see at the end of this animation that there is a large increase in the AOD near the corresponding fire locations in the previous image.
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The first image below, taken from the NAAPS Aerosol Model, shows the aerosol amounts (ug/m3) throughout the country. This estimates large amounts of smoke particulates near the surface in the regions have large smoke over them. The next image shows EPA AIRNOW AQI values for California. There were many code oranges and yellows present in this region, mainly due to ozone. The high temperatures and large amounts of sunlight during this time of year mix with certain surface emissions to cause large amounts of ozone at the ground level.
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The first image below, taken from CALIPSO, shows the overpass over most of the Midwest region and Texas. The increase in backscatter values in this region implies the increase of some aerosol or molecular constituent. Because of the large amounts of smoke from the previous images and posts, this is most likely due to the smoke. The next image, courtesy LANCE WebMapping Service and the AIRS Dust Score, shows a strong increase in dust over the Southwest region.
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