Canadian wildfire smoke over the Upper Midwest

By Scott Bachmeier • 30 May 2019

GOES-16 True Color RGB images [click to play animation | MP4]

GOES-16 (GOES-East) True Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images from the AOS site (above) revealed the arrival of a dense high-altitude smoke plume from the north, which cast a late-day shadow onto the top of a more aged layer of lower-altitude smoke over the Upper Midwest on 30 May 2019. These smoke layers were being transported from large wildfires that were burning across northern Alberta.

Images from the west-facing AOSS rooftop camera (below) showed the slow obscuration of the setting sun as the smoke layers aloft became increasingly thick.

Images from the west-facing AOSS rooftop camera [click to play animation | MP4]

The GOES-16 Smoke Detection product (below) flagged most of the lower-altitude smoke with its “High Confidence” category.

GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and Smoke Detection product [click to play animation | MP4]

The higher-altitude smoke plume that moved southward contained some cirrus debris from the pyrocumulonimbus cloud that formed at the wildfire source in northern Alberta, so it was not classified as smoke by the Smoke Detection product — the plume itself did exhibit 10.3 µm infrared brightness temperatures as cold as -57ºC as it approached the Canada/US border (below).

GOES-16 “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images [click to play animation | MP4]

Some of the lower-altitude smoke exhibited GOES-16 Aerosol Optical Depth values as high as 1.0 to 2.0 (below).

GOES-16 Aerosol Optical Depth product [click to play animation | MP4]

Categories: Air quality, GOES-16, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images

CIMSS Satellite Blog

CIMSS Satellite Blog

Canadian wildfire smoke over the Upper Midwest