{Ten extra points if you can guess what happens to a variety of air pollutants – grin} “Summertime wildfires in Alaska and Canada occur every year, with some inter-annual variations,” said Hiren Jethva, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. But the distance traveled by the smoke varies greatly. Aerosol concentration and height, as well as wind patterns and speed, are just some of the factors that determine the course of a plume’s atmospheric journey.

Jethva and colleagues first used the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite to observe the long-range transport of the July 2015 plumes. Jethva noted that the plumes were often located over lower-level clouds for much of the period shown above. Researchers have found that when aerosols are located over clouds, or any other bright surface, they can impart a net warming effect on the climate. That, in turn, can affect the stability of the atmosphere and the lifetime of clouds.

via Smoke Goes Around the World : Image of the Day.