Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite's Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite (OMPS) tracks aerosols, like this smoke, that are transported by winds across the globe.
The Voice of Russia reported that 11,000 hectares (about 42.4 square miles) of forests in Siberia were on fire in May and that the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations says roughly 80 percent of these fires are intentionally set to clear land for farming.
Colin Seftor, an atmospheric physicist working for Science Systems and Applications, Inc. at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md. studies aerosols using OMPS data and created images from them.
"This smoke event is one example that shows that what happens over one area of the Earth can easily affect another area thousands of miles away, whether it's from Asia to North America or North America to Europe, and so on. Not only smoke and dust can get carried long distance. Pollutants, and even disease-carrying spores can be carried by the prevailing winds. For this event, I found out that the smoke plumes were lofted up to at least 12 kilometers (or about 7.5 miles) from the intense heat of the fires. At that point the smoke got picked up by higher level winds," Seftor says. ...
Fires burning in Siberia recently sent smoke across the Pacific Ocean and into the U.S. and Canada. Suomi NPP satellite's Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite tracked aerosols from the fires taking six days to reach America's shores. These false-colored images make the data stand out. The blue and green colors represent less smoke. Yellows and pink represent more smoke. Smoke density is identified by the level of transparency in the coloration. The less dense the smoke is the more you can see through it, and the more dense it is, the less you can see through it. (Credit: NASA/Suomi NPP/Colin Seftor)
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