As smoke from wildfires moves east, it could be making the skies over New York City a little hazy on Friday morning. But a smokey haze doesn't always mean bad air.

Our current wildfires smoke map shows approximate locations of fires, perimeters, hot spots and more. It also forecasts downstream smoke impacts for the next 2 days.
Locations

Smoke from wildfires can affect the health of people in areas where it is generated. It can cause breathing problems, irritate eyes and worsen heart and lung diseases. It can also be very toxic, especially for children and older adults.

The smoke from fires can travel very quickly, affecting regions far from the wildfire. Consequently, it is important to use wildfire smoke maps that report air quality readings from more than just government monitoring stations.

While government stations are very accurate at their locations, there can be vast distances between them, and the resulting inaccuracy can lead to differences in real-time air quality reports. This is particularly true when fires are nearby and the smoke hasn't yet reached their sensors.

This is why it is critical to use a wildfire smoke map that includes air quality readings from a wide range of sources, including crowd-sourced and portable air quality monitors. These data are more reliable than those from government stations, which can be inaccurate in some cases when smoke from a fire doesn't reach their sensor.

ESRI offers several wildfires smoke maps, including the US Fire Map and the Global Wildfires Smoke Outlook. These maps provide information on active fires, perimeters and hot spots. They also show wind conditions and other weather information from NIFC, GeoMAC, NHSS, MODIS and other agencies.

Our smoke maps are updated every hour, and they include forecasts for the next 2 days of smoke impacts downstream from the fires. This can help you decide if it is safe to go outside.

In addition, these maps include details about the fires, such as size, containment and ownership. This information is provided to the public via the NIFC website, as well as through Inciweb.

A national support center, NIFC is the place where fire agencies work together to manage and suppress wildfires in the United States. It is located in Boise, Idaho, and is made up of eight different agencies and organizations that cooperate to coordinate firefighting efforts.

The Active Fire Mapping Program provides access to near real-time satellite active fire detection data that can be used to identify hotspots, create and update wildfire smoke maps, and more. The program is currently migrating to a new web-based platform, FIRMS US/Canada, in 2021.
Hot Spots

The current wildfires smoke map includes hot spots where a fire is burning, detected by satellites or MODIS. It also shows the active fire perimeters based on reports from incident management teams at the scene.

These premium overlays can be useful for identifying areas of concern and monitoring changes in air quality. Stations that measure and report AQI data are indicated on the map by a colored dot, which corresponds to the most recent reading. A customizable chart of the 7-day sensor history can be displayed to further examine how the AQI may have recently changed.

For some people living near a fire, their health is of utmost concern. Hot spots of air pollution can affect everyone nearby. This is because they can build up over time, exposing people to dangerous levels of toxins. Some hot spots are so bad that the EPA considers them a public health emergency.

In some cases, air pollution can be more hazardous when there are clusters of hot spots in a city, county or state. Often these are due to local industries or facilities emitting hazardous air pollutants. It can be difficult to assess the extent of the hazard and whether it poses a public health risk.

However, this can be done using GIS. In our study, we employed a variety of statistical tools in a geographic information system (GIS) (ArcGIS Pro version 2.7) to determine the location of apparent clusters of wildfire activity and the extent to which these clusters were statistically significant hot spots. We validated the results of our default run with additional runs of smaller and larger neighborhood scales.

When using a larger neighborhood scale, we found that the number of statistically significant hot spots decreased significantly. The maximum number of incidents by cell did not change under either scale, although the distribution of hot and cold spots changed. This suggests that we should explore the possibility of combining local clusters with coarser scale clusters to support decision making on various issues at different spatial and spatiotemporal scales.

We also examined the spatial and temporal variation in incidents at multiple neighborhood distances. We found that under the default neighborhood scale (47 km), there was a high degree of spatiotemporal variation in the number of incidents. In particular, we found that cells in Yakima and Okanogan counties had a greater degree of spatiotemporal variation than cells elsewhere. This is likely a reflection of the fact that these two counties have a higher proportion of large agricultural industries than any other area in Washington. This is likely contributing to the high number of statistically significant hot spots found under the default neighborhood scale.
Smoke Plumes

During extreme fire events, smoke plumes can travel far from the wildfires. They can be miles across and even float over the ocean. Smoke from large fires can carry dangerous air pollution miles away, affecting everyone's health.

A team of researchers recently flew through smoke at a high altitude, testing how the ingredients in the vapors change as they travel downwind, and found that some of those chemicals react faster than expected. It's all part of a complex chemistry process that occurs inside smoke plumes, and this study provides new insights into how they interact with the atmosphere.

These findings provide important information for assessing how the climatology of wildfires may evolve under climate driven trends toward increasingly intense wildfire activity. They also highlight the importance of understanding how the plume's vertical distribution changes over time.

The resulting physics-based plume rise climatology leverages a unique dataset of satellite burned areas, atmospheric modeling outputs and wildfire emissions to generate a regional scale smoke-plume transport climatology that spans a range of altitudes. We then combine this climatology with a vertical smoke detrainment model, which estimates the rate at which smoke is injected into the air above and below plume tops.

This model is able to predict where the smoke will end up, allowing us to estimate its impacts on local weather. It also identifies pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which are a type of cloud that can form when smoke plumes ignite. The research also highlights how these clouds can impact the environment by changing wind patterns, increasing the likelihood of drought conditions and affecting water availability.

In addition, the team found that some plumes are able to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere than they appear on the smoke map. The HYSPLIT trajectories for the six fires they studied are modeled at various altitudes, which represents a range of possible injection heights that a given fire can inject into the atmosphere.

This analysis also uncovered the fact that many of the plumes that were modeled straddled their observed tops, meaning they both went above and below plume tops in the same region, and this occurred in 71% of the sets examined. This suggests that plumes can be pushed higher into the sky than they appear on the smoke map, and that this effect can increase air pollution levels.
Air Quality

The smoke from wildfires is made up of many different components, but the main one of concern is fine particulate matter, which can go deep into your lungs and even get into your bloodstream. It can irritate your eyes and throat, cause coughing, and worsen respiratory symptoms, especially in sensitive groups such as pregnant women and kids with developing lungs or heart disease.

Smoke also can irritate your sinuses and trigger watery and itchy eyes. It can also make you feel fatigued and lethargic. The best thing you can do is stay indoors and minimize your exposure to the smoke.

If you need to get outside, there are several air quality monitors available. You can find a PurpleAir sensor or the AirNow app in your area that will allow you to track air quality.

PurpleAir sensors are coffee can sized devices that measure fine particles in the air. They’re Wi-Fi enabled and can be placed at any location, either outdoors or indoors.

They send the data to an app that will display hourly readings on a map. The app can be accessed via the website or a mobile phone app.

While they may not be as accurate as the official government monitors, they’re much more local and cost effective. The official government monito rs are state-regulated and often calibrated by scientists. wildfire


But they’re more sparsely located than the PurpleAir network of hundreds of monitors across North America.

There’s a good reason for this: The EPA and the Forest Service are working together on a project that merges air quality data from both official and PurpleAir sensors in an effort to provide a more accurate, real-time map and report.

The resulting data comes from hundreds of monitoring stations across the country and the globe, according to the EPA and U.S. Forest Service.

It’s a project that is designed to improve air quality reporting for both the public and businesses. The information is based on the EPA’s Air Quality Index, which is how it rates the concentration of PM2.5 (fine particulates that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter) and other pollutants at each location.