Covered more than 8 thousand kilometres. Satellite imagery shows the arrival of smoke from US wildfires to Europe

Quoted the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service as saying that smoke from forest fires in the western United States of America has reached Europe.

While data collected by the Atmospheric Monitoring Service revealed that the smoke traveled 8,000 km through the air to Britain and other parts of northern Europe. The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, which operates some Copernicus satellite monitoring systems, said the fires in California, Oregon and Washington state have generated an estimated 30.3 million metric tons of carbon.

Mark Barrington, a senior scientist and forest fire expert with the Copernicus Atmosphere Watch Service, said, “The scale and scope of these fires have reached a much higher level than any fire our surveillance data has covered 18 years ago, since 2003.”

Barrington stated that the thickness of the smoke from the fires, called the optical depth of the aerosol, was enormous, according to satellite measurements.

Regarding aerosols, Barrington said that the optical depth levels of the aerosols reached extremely high values ​​of 7 or higher, which was confirmed by the independent ground measurement. With this in the correct range, the optical thickness of the fire aerosol could actually indicate a lot of the aerosols in the atmosphere.