U.S. Air Quality

Fires in the Southeast region with large plume.

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. There are small plumes and a high concentration of fires in the Southeast region. These fires have been burning steadily for the past few days with a large plume moving towards the Mid-Atlantic region. There is also a large plume moving in towards the Gulf of Mexico. The second image below, courtesy GASP East (Goes EAST), shows the derived AOD animation 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. You can see raised values off the western coast of the Southeast region and the Gulf of Mexico that may be due to the concentration of fires in the region.

The first image, courtesy EPA AIRNOW, shows the AQI values for the Pacific southwest today. Most of these scattered code yellows and isolated code oranges are due to PM 2.5 that are just from the urban aerosol environment. The next image, courtesy NAAPS, shows the modeled Smoke Surface Concentration (ug/m3) for the entire country for today. The model couples nicely with the NOAA HMS product to show that these smoke plumes may be impacting the AQ in some of the southern states in the next few days.