As I left work Friday evening I could detect a smoky aroma in the air. And looking out from The Sun's garage on Calvert Street, I noted a pretty thick haze. Maybe you got a whiff of it too, on Friday or Saturday.

Turns out, as forecast earlier in the week, we were downwind of several stubborn wildfires in eastern North Carolina and in the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia. Those fires have been burning for quite a while now, and on Friday the winds finally shifted and began carrying the smoke up from the south. It eventually got all the way to New Hampshire before more wind shifts began to sweep it out over the ocean.

This sort of thing happens from time to time. Anybody else recall a weekend in 2002 when forest fires in Quebec began sending smoke wafting our way. It smelled like smokehouse in Baltimore, and the skies were noticeably beige as a result. 

And lots more probably remember the smokey stump dump fire in Clarksville 10 years ago this month, and another in Baltimore County that began in 1992, sent smoke drifting across the city, burned for 18 months and cost $3 million to control.  

Anyway, here's how the NC and VA fires looked Saturday, from NASA's orbiting Aqua Earth Observing satellite. They're still burning. I suspect vacationers on the Outer Banks are pretty sick of the smell. Anybody reading this on the OBX?

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)
                    

Measurements of air pollutants over the North Pacific have documented one of Asia's biggest exports - air pollution. A NASA study has concluded that some 40 billion pounds of aerosols - smoke, ash, and acid droplets from forest fires, coal stoves, automotive and industrial exhaust  - drifted out across the Pacific between 2002 and 2005. About 10 billion pounds of that reached North America.

That incoming pollution is about 15 percent the volume of the pollution we generate ourselves. The study's lead author, Hongbin Yu, of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, said, “This is a significant percentage at a time when the U.S. is trying to decrease pollution emissions to boost overall air quality. This means that any reduction in our emissions may be offset by the pollution aerosols coming from East Asia and other regions.” Yu is an assistant research scientist at UMBC, currently working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

Satellites have tracked the pollution during its journey from East Asia and Russia, and provided scientists with data for their estimates of the volume and contents of the brown clouds. Rapid industrial growth in China has made matters worse, the study found.

Here's how it looked to the satellite's instruments on one day in 2003. You can read all about it here.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)