July 3, 2012
Large smoke still covering most of U.S. Heavy ozone causes code red in Grand Rapids, MI.
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 concentrations are in northern Oklahoma and Central Kansas. Also, Colorado has a continuing amount of fires spreading smoke and particulate matter across the country. The next animation shows the AOD values corresponding to the midwest region discussed earlier. Some of the raised values directly relate to the wildfires, but others are due to the large concentrations of smoke.
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The first image below shows the AQI values, for the Great Lakes Region. The highest values occur in Grand Rapids, MI. These high temperatures and low cloud cover increase the levels of ozone. The next image shows the actual surface data for Grand Rapids, with the hourly ozone concentrations in parts per billion (ppb) per hour, which increase as these day time temperatures increase.
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The first image shows the NOAA forecast for ozone hourly concentrations. The next image shows the CALIPSO 532 nm Attenuated Backscatter for the swath that crosses the central part of the country. Because of the widespread amount of fires, there are many layers of particulate matter and debris in the air. This first layers in this image (going from left to right) are between 5 and 10 km, the next layers are from 3-5 km, and then the remaining aerosols are from 3 km to the surface. The back trajecotory below this, courtesy NOAA HYSPLIT, shows that at least the highest layer that was ~7.5 km picked up some particulates in the Southwest region that may be smoke from nearby fires.
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