October 2, 2012
Smoke from Texas fires, dust in the Southwest and high ozone in Houston, TX
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 stretching from Texas and into Mississippi Valley region. There is also a large concentration of fires in the Pacific Northwest and in the northern Plains. The Texas fires are emitting large amounts of smoke which has been causing many health concerns as that smoke begins to reach the surface. The image below, courtesy GASP MODIS (Terra satellite), shows the AOD image for the country today. You can see that most of these raised values correspond to more optically thick areas, which correspond to the fires and smoke debris throughout the nation. The raised values in the Pacific Southwest, specifically in southern Nevada, may be due to dust.
 |  |
The first image below shows the image for EPA AIRNOW AQI values for the Pacific Southwest region. Most of these raised values are due to ozone in the region. Below, in the NOAA ozone national forecast, higher temperatures and sunlight fueled this increase in ozone (as opposed to the wet and cold eastern seaboard). Additionally, there were large amounts of ozone forecasted near Houston, TX.
 |  |
The first image below shows the AIRS data overlapped with the MODIS terra image, using the LANCE Webmapping Service. Various small plumes are currently blowing throughout the region. The NOAA dust forecast shows that this dust will be moving eastward throughout the week. The last image shows data from the EPA AIRNOW PM 10 values for most of Nevada.
 |  |
 |