Recently, pictures of New York City went around the world. The entire air mass was filled with yellowish dust consisting of ash and other particles, and resulting in gloomy and almost apocalyptic scenes in the megalopolis. Responsible for the smoke clouds were the ongoing wildfires in Canada, which started exceptionally early this year. In fact, Canadians are used to this event, and speak of a so-called wildfire season, when several wildfires usually and mostly naturally occur. But this year seems to be different. Although the season has only started, the destruction has already affected much larger areas than expected. It is officially confirmed that the ongoing wildfire season is the worst on record in the Canadian history.
For days now, large smoke clouds have been making their way across the Atlantic, heading towards Europe. One major reason for this specific transportation is the Jet Stream, a fast-flowing air current blowing from west to east in higher altitudes of our atmosphere. You can easily track the Smoke Clouds with various weather maps. While the satellite map enables you to track the past 24 hours of global cloud circulation patterns, the CO and Aerosol Optical Depth Maps show (among others) the particles consisting of burned matter, and their specific transportation patterns and density. CO, for example, is a very suitable indicator of wildfire emissions and their distribution because CO molecules emitted to the atmosphere are rather unreactive and thus have a long lifetime, which makes them useable tracers. The aerosol optical depth comprises all kinds of aerosols, it is however assumed that in this case, higher densities of aerosols heading towards Europe are at least partially caused by the wildfires in Canada.
According to our weather maps, the suspended particles will arrive in Europe on Wednesday (2023-06-28). During the next few days, the smoke cloud will sweep over Europe from the northwest, weakening gradually. Most likely, the particulate matter will not impact the health of inhabitants. It is also extremely unlikely that European cities will be covered in ash clouds, as was the case in New York and many others. Nevertheless, it may lead to unbelievably stunning sunsets in some places due to air pollution. This is because the more polluted the air is, the more light is scattered by suspended particles such as soot, fine dust, etc. Especially the reddish scattering can be seen particularly well at sunset and sunrise under these conditions.
