Canadian Forest Fire Smoke - GOES Aerosol/Smoke Product (GASP)
3-10 July 2002
In early July 2002, forest fires in Quebec (sparked by
lightning) produced smoke that was transported by winds southward to the East
Coast of the U.S.
The following pages provide loops of GASP imagery for 3-10 July 2002. In
general, the smoke plume appears as large aerosol optical depths (orange to red
colors) in the Northeast U.S.
[The grayscale features in the imagery are
either clouds or regions where the aerosol retrieval fails - i.e., the Southwest
U.S. - while the colors represent level of aerosol optical depth in cloud free
areas ... values are depicted on the colorbar]
These loops are rather large (~12 Mb each) and may take a few
moments to load.
- 4
July - No smoke present, but significant aerosol over the East Coast
(Saharan dust over the Carribean is also present).
- 5
July - Aerosol still present off East Coast while fires start in Quebec.
- 6
July - Massive amounts of smoke particles are transported south from the
fires over New York and Pennsylvannia.
- 7
July - Transport of the smoke continues through the day reaching the coast
of North Carolina as well as most of New England.
- 8
July - Most of the smoke has been transported away from the US, however,
some remains around DC.
- 9
July - The East Coast is now primarily smoke free ... but there were still
very low visibilities in the DC region.
- 10
July - Most of New England and New York is smoke free, some aerosol burden
is higher near DC.
GASP Information
- The algorithm is under development by Ken
Knapp - a CIRA visiting
scientist at NOAA/NESDIS/ORA
- The algorithm runs in real time with imagery available via the web.