June 17, 2012
Weekend edition: Dust storm in Arizona and fires/smoke updates
Many fires across the US were reported throughout this week. This weekend, HMS reported that thin smoke was observed "stretching from the eastern Dakotas and western Minnesota back to the southwest through northern Nebraska, northern Colorado and into southeast Utah" (top, left). It is very likely that the source was the remnants of smoke from the fires in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
As we can see in the AIRNow animation loop from today (top, right) and the maps of ozone peak and average PM2.5 concentrations from yesterday, the smoke from those fires continue to impact the air quality in the surrounding regions. Unhealthy levels of ozone (for sensitive groups - code orange) was observed from Northeastern Wisconsin into the Michigan Peninsula and also in Southern California on Saturday. Today, as can be seen in the animation below, the air quality in both regions showed improvement, specially in the Midwest region.
 |  |
 |  |
Yesterday in Arizona, a very impressive dust storm was generated from a large thunderstorm outflow over the southeast portion of the state. The blowing dust moved across the Phoenix area and pictures from the storm can be seen in the abc15 website.
Mark Ruminski from HMS/NOAA kindly provided us with this nice animation of GOES-East imagery which shows not only the dust storm but different fires as well.
 |