DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY
THROUGH 2030Z July 6, 2015
SMOKE: Alaska/Canada/Central to Eastern U.S: The tremendous number of large wildfires continue to burn over vast stretches of northern Saskatchewan and Alberta with additional fires in southern Northwest Territories and northeast British Columbia. There is a bit of a break in the fires over the Yukon Territory and eastern Alaska but another large batch of fires is seen in central Alaska while fires seen yesterday in southwest Alaska have mostly been beneath thick cloud cover today from a storm system rotating north across the Aleutians. These fires are producing an enormous amount of smoke that ranges virtually unbroken from the far northeastern tip of Siberia across Alaska, southern Yukon and southwest Northwest Territories and then covers nearly all of central Canada from the Rockies to Quebec. The smoke has also been drawn south into the US by a large cyclone over Hudson Bay and covers much of the northern Plains, the mid Mississippi Valley, The Great Lakes States, Ohio and Tennessee Valley and the northeast US before exiting off the New England and mid Atlantic coasts. Cloud cover along a front likely obscures some of the smoke across portions of the upper Mississippi Valley and Midwest. While much of the smoke is aloft there are vast stretches of moderately dense to dense smoke, most notably over the eastern Great Lakes, over and off the coast of the northeast US, across the Canadian Maritimes, from northeast British Columbia, north Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan southward into the Dakotas/Minnesota, and finally over a large portion of northern Alaska stretching northwest towards Siberia. Pacific Northwest: Wildfires burning in British Columbia yesterday and today continue to produce smoke that has stretched southward along the British Columbia coastline and into the Pacific Northwest US including north Washington, north Idaho, and northwest Montana where additional fires are also generating smoke. In particular, two very large fires in southwest British Columbia produced very dense plumes of smoke yesterday that continue to drift both southwest and east while the fires emit new smoke as well. Some smoke from the fires to the north has drifted down into northeast Oregon as well. DUST: Gulf of Mexico/Southern U.S/Atlantic Ocean: An expansive area of Saharan dust continues to be seen over much of the Caribbean and extending into the western and central Gulf of Mexico. The dust spreads to the coastline along southeastern Texas and inland through central/north Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and west Missouri before disappearing beneath clouds. The exact extent of the dust is difficult to determine due to the presence of these clouds and the diffuse nature of the dust in the region. The dust is also seen over southern Florida and across the Bahamas into the Atlantic wrapping northeastward off the Eastern Seaboard. Far North Alaska/Beaufort Sea: An area of aerosol that appears to be dust from Asia is seen in visible satellite imagery drifting east across the North Slope of Alaska and over the Arctic waters where ice cover still exists. This aerosol is just north of the dense smoke from the Alaska fires. Sheffler THIS TEXT PRODUCT IS PRIMARILY INTENDED TO DESCRIBE SIGNIFICANT AREAS OF SMOKE ASSOCIATED WITH ACTIVE FIRES AND SMOKE WHICH HAS BECOME DETACHED FROM THE FIRES AND DRIFTED SOME DISTANCE AWAY FROM THE SOURCE FIRE..TYPICALLY OVER THE COURSE OF ONE OR MORE DAYS. AREAS OF BLOWING DUST ARE ALSO DESCRIBED. USERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO VIEW A GRAPHIC DEPICTION OF THESE AND OTHER PLUMES WHICH ARE LESS EXTENSIVE AND STILL ATTACHED TO THE SOURCE FIRE IN VARIOUS GRAPHIC FORMATS ON OUR WEB SITE: JPEG: http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/land/hms.html GIS: http://www.firedetect.noaa.gov/viewer.htm KML: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/FIRE/kml.html ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS REGARDING THIS PRODUCT SHOULD BE SENT TO SSDFireTeam@noaa.gov