Satellite imagery shows US wildfires smoke moving East towards Europe

Smoke from the wildfires that have been burning across the western United States will reach Europe this weekend. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), which is monitoring the scale and intensity of the fires and the transport of the smoke has said that smoke is moving back across North America from the Pacific and is on its way to Europe. 

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Most intense till date

CAMS said that the fire activity in the United States this year has been tens to hundreds of times more intense than previous years. The fires this year released a lot of smoke polluting the atmosphere and those in California and Oregon have already emitted far more carbon in 2020 than in any other year since 2003, said CAMS as it began recording fire activity from 2003 onwards. 

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Visible satellite imagery shows that an enormous area has been affected by heavy smoke released by the fires. CAMS said that it uses satellite observations of aerosols, carbon monoxide, and other constituents of smoke to monitor and forecast its movement through the atmosphere.

"CAMS data agreed with satellite images that the heaviest smoke remained off the US coast over the Pacific Ocean for several days, but that the smoke has been blowing back across North America in recent days, over the US and Canada. CAMS forecasts – made by combining satellite data with models of the atmosphere – predict that smoke is starting to cross the Atlantic again and will reach northern Europe later this week, as it did at the end of last week," the European Union's climate monitoring service said on its website. 

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"The fact that these fires are emitting so much pollution into the atmosphere that we can still see thick smoke over 8000 kilometres away reflects just how devastating they have been in their magnitude and duration," said CAMS Senior Scientist Mark Parrington.

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(Image Credit: NASA)