Fire, smoke and air quality in Portugal

Series of images taken by NOAA’s NPP VIIRS satellite over Portugal and northern Spain showing progression of fires in the region. There were no fires on August 5^th. Small fires (red dots on the image) started appearing on August 6^th and quickly spreading all over the region. In general this region observe good air quality conditions with observed AODs on August 5^th are less than 0.1. As fire started spreading in the larger region, air quality quickly became poor with AOD values as high as 1.0 (even higher in some areas). The impact on air quality over populated area still remains minimal due to prevailing wind directions, which transported most of the smoke over ocean. Read more on these fires at BBC

Fires and smoke continue in central Russia: Satellite View

Fires in central Russia are burning for almost two months now. These satellite images from August 4, 2016 show fire, smoke and its impact on atmospheric aerosol loading and air quality in the region. The Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) is a measure of particle loading in the atmosphere, which reaches as high as 2-3 on this day, which indicates very high loading of PM2.5 in the air. Another air quality indicator and emission from fires is carbon monoxide (CO) gas showing very high concentration in the satellite image. Data source: NASA Worldview (https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/)