by Canada faces another dangerous running fire season in which burning forests send smoke clouds over the provinces and back to the USA. The pace of the 2025 fires is reminiscent of the record season of 2023, which showed millions of people in North America to a dangerous level of smoke.
In most cases of the past decade, forecastics have been able to use satellites to pursue these clouds of smoke, but the view was only two -dimensional: the satellites could not determine how close the smoke on the earth’s surface.
The height of the smoke is important.
When a cloud is high in the atmosphere, it doesn’t have the air, people breathe – it simply hovers over head with far.
But when clouds of smoke are close to the surface, people breathe in forest fire chemicals and tiny particles. These particles, which are known as PM2.5, can dive deep into the lungs and make asthma and other breathing and heart problems worse.
The Environmental Protection Agency uses a network of ground -based air quality monitors to output air quality warnings. However, the monitors are only a few and far apart, which means that forecasts in large parts of the country were wide estimates.
Now a new satellite-based method, where I and colleagues at universities and federal authorities have been working in the past two years, gives scientists and air quality managers a 3D image of the clouds of smoke and provide detailed data of the risks except for the neighborhood level for urban and rural areas.
Building a nationwide smoke monitoring system
The new method uses data from a satellite that NASA 2023 has initiated as troposphere dissions as monitoring of pollution or pace, satellites, as a stroposphere input.
Data from the Tempo satellite show the height of the cloud of smoke, measured in kilometers. Heavy blue areas are closest to the ground, which indicates the worst air quality. Rosa areas indicate that the smoke above the ground is more than 3.2 kilometers (more than 2 miles), where it is not very risk to human health. The data is also aligned with air measurement values. Noaa Nesdis Center for Satellite Applications and Research
Temp makes it possible to determine the height of a cloud of smoke by providing data about how much the oxygen molecules absorb sunlight in the 688 nanometer wavelength. Smoke flags that are high in the atmosphere reflect more solar radiation back to space, while those who are lower in the atmosphere where the light gives more oxygen to absorb the light.
Understanding physics enabled scientists to develop algorithms who use the data of speed in order to close the height of the cloud of smoke and to assign its 3D movement in almost real time.
By combining the data of speed with particles in the atmosphere, which were absorbed by the advanced base basis on the GOS-R satellites of the NOAA, prognostics can evaluate the health risk of clouds of smoke better in almost real time, provided the clouds are not in the way.
This is a big leap from the support to based air quality monitors, which may be hundreds of kilometers apart. In Iowa, for example, around 50 air quality monitors were reported on a recent day for a state that covers 56,273 square miles. Most of these monitors were stuck around its largest cities.
The Aerosolwatch tool from Noaa currently offers an almost real stream of forest fire smoke pictures from the GOS-R satellites, and the agency plans to include speed data data. A prototype of this system from the NASA-supported research project of my team on fire and air quality, called Fireaq, shows how users can zoom in the neighborhood level in order to determine how high the cloud of smoke is. However, the prototype is currently only updated once a day. Therefore, the data is delayed and it is unable to deliver smoke height in which the clouds are handed down.
The health risks of the running fire are increasing
The fire risk increases throughout North America because the global temperatures rise and more people move to wildland areas.
While the air quality in most of the United States has improved thanks to strict emission regulations for vehicles and power plants thanks to strict emission regulations and power plants, forest fires have reversed this trend in parts of western US research that forest fire smoke has deleted air quality progress there for almost two decades.
Our progress in smoke surveillance marks a new era in the air quality forecast and offer more precise and timely information in order to better protect public health in view of these escalating forest fire threats.
This article will be released from the conversation, a non -profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and trustworthy analyzes to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Jun Wang, University of Iowa
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The group of Prof. Wang was supported by Noaa, NASA and Naval OnR to develop a research algorithm to get the height of the aerosol layer. The research algorithm’s arithmetic codes were shared with colleagues in Noaa.
