Smoke & Other Atmospheric Effects Of Wildfires

[EnolaGaia]

The ever-increasing plague of wildfires is pumping huge volumes of smoke into the atmosphere and even generating clouds and weather phenomena.

The smoke is also affecting air quality across larger and larger areas worldwide. For the first time in recorded history wildfire smoke has reached the North Pole.

Smoke from wildfires reaches North Pole for first time in recorded history

Wildfire smoke has made it to the North Pole for the first time in recorded history, NASA said, as multiple blazes continued to rage across Russia on Tuesday. One of the country's coldest regions has been especially hard hit, with smoke so bad that it blacked out the sun, the Guardian newspaper reported.

The Sakha Republic in Siberia is one of the coldest areas in the world and sits on top of permafrost. This year it has seen record high temperatures and drought, and vast swaths of its forests have burned.

"There have always been large fires in Siberia. It is a landscape evolved to burn," Jessica McCarty, an earth scientist at Miami University in Ohio, told NASA's Earth Observatory. "What is different because of climate change is that fires are burning larger areas, affecting places farther to the north, and consuming fuels that would have been more fire resistant in the past." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/smoke-russia-wildfires-reaches-north-pole/

 

[Austin Popper]

Wow! It's bad enough that it smells like a campfire outside our house, but the North Pole? We've had our worst smoke days this year in the past couple of weeks. Today one can see the mountains, or at least their outline, fifteen miles away. There are places that are much worse at the moment, of course. It varies widely.

Here is a site that tracks it in North America, with interactive maps that work amazingly well, followed by a screen shot.

https://fire.airnow.gov/#