Long-range transport of smoke from wildfires in Canada and northeastern Minnesota
Numerous wildfires began to increase in size and intensity from northern Minnesota to central Canada in mid-July 2026, as previously discussed on this blog (13 July | 14 July | 15 July). A large scale view of the GOES-19 (GOES-East) Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) derived product on 15 July (above) displayed the long-range transport of this wildfire smoke across parts of the central/eastern Lower 48 states and the western Atlantic Ocean. The southernmost plume of high AOD was being recirculated inland from the Atlantic. Surface weather symbols of smoke or haze indicated that some of this smoke was reaching the ground (and adversely affecting visibility and air quality).
Even though the Aerosol Optical Depth derived product has a default AWIPS color table range from 0 to 1, the actual sampled AOD values associated with particularly dense smoke were as high as 3.22 over central New York (below).
Gaps in the AOD were due to the Cloud Mask product preventing AOD creation where thick clouds were present — so simply looking at GOES-19 Visible imagery (below) perhaps offered a smoother depiction of the hazy smoke transport.
GOES-19 True Color RGB images (below) provided the best qualitative view of the wildfire smoke transport.
The GOES-19 imagery shown in this blog post ended at 2021 UTC — shortly thereafter, the satellite suffered an anomaly, and went into “safehold” mode while NOAA/NESDIS engineers worked to diagnose the problem.