Smoke from Canada wildfires over the U.S.

Wildfires in one area means smoke and pollution travels to surrounding areas, even thousands of miles away. For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, and Margot Sanger-Katz have the maps and charts that show how smoke traveled from the wildfires in Quebec, Canada.

Tags: , , ,

Maps of wildfire smoke pollution

Wildfire obviously damages the areas it comes in direct contact with, but wildfire smoke can stretch much farther. Based on research by Childs et al., Mira Rojanasakul, for The New York Times, shows how pollution from smoke spread between 2006 and 2020.

My kids’ rooms still have air filters from a few years ago, when a fire many miles away made the sky orange and our indoor environment smokey.

Tags: , , ,

3-D rendering of Dixie fire smoke clouds

The New York Times used radar data to create a 3-D model of the Dixie fire smoke clouds:

The raw data was collected every 10 minutes in radial sweeps around the radar stations, each at a higher altitude. The Times combined and reformatted the data using Py-ART, a collection of algorithms and utilities used regularly in radar analysis. We then filtered it to reduce noise.

We applied color and texture to the 3-D volume to approximate a smoke- and cloud-like look. And we interpolated the sequence in time to create a smoother video animation.

The data comes from the NOAA Next Generation Radar (seems to be down right now), and the rendering was inspired by Neil Lareau’s more barebones chart.

Tags: , , ,

Smoke from the U.S. West Coast travels east and overseas

Smoke from the wildfires made its way to the other side of the country and over the ocean. Using data from NOAA, Reuters animated the smoke clouds over time:

With climate change expected to exacerbate fires in the future, by worsening droughts and warming surface ocean temperatures, wildfire research is becoming especially important. Over the last year, the world has seen record fires in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Siberia and now the U.S. West.

“I’m concerned that we are starting to see these phenomena more often … everywhere in the world,” Gassó said. “If it’s one year like this, it’s fine, as long as it doesn’t keep repeating itself like this.”

Uh oh.

Tags: , , ,

Fire and smoke map

With the rush of wildfires in California, governor Gavin Newsom declared (another) state of emergency. The Fire and Smoke Map from the U.S. Forest Service and Environmental Protection Agency provides a picture of where we’re currently at. The map incorporates data from a variety of sensors across the country:

The sensor data comes from PurpleAir, which crowdsources data from that company’s particle pollution sensors and shows the data on a map. Before the sensor data appear on the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map, EPA and USFS apply both a scientific correction equation to mitigate bias in the sensor data, and the NowCast, the algorithm to show the data in the context of the Air Quality Index.

Tags: ,