September 1, 2012
Weekend edition: Isaac moves northeasterly, pushing haze ahead of it
A very active weather week is coming to an end. Isaac is done pummeling Louisiana and now is bringing much needed rain to the drought areas in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Nearly 3" of rain fell in middle Indiana on Saturday. Isaac is expected to continue its plodding speed across the Appalachians and will exit the US by Tuesday or Wednesday. In front of Isaac, the haze which was present in the mid-Atlantic is now stuck off the east Coast. In the image below (left) significant haze is seen off the east coast. On the right we have Friday's overpass of CALIPSO which shows the same haze up to 11 kilometers altitude. This corresponds to the lidar profiles that Ruben, Daniel and Alex showed this week from the CREST lidars.
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The west continues to be plagued by fires in northern California and along the Idaho/Montana border. Alex showed Friday that there is favorable flow for this smoke to continue to impact the east coast. In the first panel, CALIPSO's overpass of Montana shows plumes of smoke up to 49°N. On the right, the fires are seen in the MODIS AQUA overpass on Saturday, overlaid with the the FIRMS fire locations.
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The California fires are shown in the panel below.
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Update: September 2, 2012 17:00 EDT
The particulate AQI shows that there are areas of hazardous air quality today in Oregon and Salmon, Idaho. PM concentrations are above 240 µg m-3. The smoke we saw yesterday in the midwest is now over the Great Lakes (see below right). Mike Fromm has posted information on the pyroCb listserve which identifies the 11-12 km plume shown above off the east coast as coming from a blow up along the Nebraska/Montana border.
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