Canada is confronted with another dangerous fire season when burning forests send smoke bursts through the provinces and again to the United States. 2025 The pace of fires is reminiscent of a record 2023. The fire season, which has revealed a dangerous smoke level for millions of people in North America.
Most of the last decade, forecasters were able to use satellites to follow these smoke bursts, but the image was only two -dimensional: the satellites could not determine how close the smoke was on the Earth’s surface.
The smoke height is important.
If there is plenty of atmosphere, it will not affect the air when people breathe – it is just floating so far.
But when the smoke bursts are close to the surface, people breathe fire chemicals and small particles. Those particles known as PM2.5 can get involved in the lungs and worsen asthma and other respiratory and heart problems.
The Environmental Protection Agency uses a network of ground air quality monitors to issue air quality warnings, but the monitors are small and distant, which means that many forecasts have been widely evaluated.
Now a new satellite -based method that I and colleagues have been working on the universities and federal agencies for the last two years, we can give scientists and air quality managers a 3D smoke flash, providing detailed risk data to neighborhood levels to both city and rural areas.
Creating a national smoke tracking system
The new method uses satellite data released by NASA in 2023, known as the troposphere emissions: pollution or tempo.
Tempo satellite data indicate the height of the smoke slit, measured in kilometers. Light blue areas are closest to the ground, which indicates the worst air quality. Pink zones indicate that smoke is larger than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) above the ground, where it is little risk for human health. The data is compatible with the air monitor’s readings taken at the same time. NOAA NESDIS Satellite Application and Research Center
The tempo allows you to determine the height of the smoke fiber by providing data on how much oxygen molecules absorb sunlight at 688 nanometer wavelength. Smoke bursts, which are high in atmosphere, reflect more sunlight, at this wavelength back into space, and in the atmosphere below, where there is more oxygen to absorb the light, reflect less.
The understanding of physics allowed scientists to develop algorithms that use tempo data to determine the height of the smoke feathers and to connect its 3D movement in almost real time.
By combining pace data with particle measurements in the atmosphere, taken on the Gos-R satellites of the advanced original video, the forecasters can better evaluate the health of the smoke bursts if the clouds do not interfere with almost real time.
This is a big leap when you rely on air quality monitors on the ground, which can be hundreds of miles away. For example, Ajova had about 50 air quality monitors announcing the recent day of the state, covering 56,273 square miles. Many of those monitors were divided into his largest cities.
Currently, the NOAA Aerosolwatch tool provides almost real-time fire smoke images from Geod-R satellites, and the agency plans to include pace height data. The prototype of this system from my team’s NASA research project on fire and air quality called “Fireaq” shows how users can bring the neighborhood closer to see how large the smoke propagation is, but the prototype is currently updated once a day, so data is delayed and does not participate in smoke height.
Fire fire health risks are growing
The risk of fire is increasing throughout North America as the world temperature rises and more people move to the territories of wild edges.
Although the air quality in most of the US increased in 2000-2020, due to stricter rules of vehicles and electric emissions, fires have eliminated that the Western US research trend has shown that wildfires have actually deleted air quality progress for nearly two decades.
Our progress during the smoke monitoring denotes a new era of air quality forecasting, offering more accurate and timely information to better protect public health in the face of these increasing fire threats.
This article has been published from a conversation, non -profit, independent news organizations that provide you with facts and reliable analysis to help you give meaning to our complex world. It wrote: Jun Wang, Ajova University
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Prof. The Wang Group was based on NOAA, NASA and Naval Onr to create a research algorithm to obtain aerosol layer height. The codes for the calculation of the study algorithm were shared with colleagues NOAA.