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Canadian wildfire smoke over Alaska

By Scott Bachmeier •

10-minute GOES-18 True Color RGB images (top) and Near-Infrared “Cirrus” (1.37 µm) images (bottom), from 1200 UTC on 11 June to 0500 UTC on 12 June [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-18 (GOES-West) True Color RGB and Near-Infrared “Cirrus” (1.37 µm) images from the CSPP GeoSphere site (above) showed a plume of Canadian wildfire smoke over parts of Alaska on 11 June 2025. This plume of smoke aloft was initially drifting westward across Yukon and Interior Alaska early in the day — then curved southward as it eventually wrapped around the circulation of a large low pressure system in the Gulf of Alaska later in the day. The 1.37 µm “Cirrus” spectral band is effective at detecting visible light scattered by airborne particles (such as cirrus cloud ice crystals, airborne dust or volcanic ash, and in this case, smoke — for example, see other cases in 2020 and 2017). Note that the ribbon of wildfire smoke was more apparent over the eastern Gulf of Alaska in the 1.37 µm imagery compared to the True Color RGB imagery (due to bright lower-altitude clouds masking the hazy appearance of the smoke) — especially toward the end of the time period, when the leading edge of the ribbon of smoke began to move over the Alaska Panhandle (0400 UTC image comparison).

GOES-18 Visible images with plots of Ceiling/Visibility (below) confirmed that this smoke remained aloft, with no restriction of surface visibility at any of the sites beneath the plume (visibility in miles is the bottom number, just below the circles listing cloud ceiling values at each site).

10-minute GOES-18 Red Visible (0.64 µm) images with hourly plots Ceiling/Visibility (cyan), from 0900 UTC on 11 June to 0400 UTC on 12 June [click to play MP4 animation]

Categories: GOES-18, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images