No More Siberian Smoke! But we got enough of our own!

There is lots of smoke over the Northwest these days from regional fires, as shown by the MODIS imagery below.  And as I have mentioned in a previous blog, we see the unusual movement of smoke from fires over eastern WA to the west side. Dense smoke is found over the eastern slopes of the Cascades and in the valleys of Idaho.

However,....something profound has changed....we are no longer seeing the smoke come over from Asia.  One big reason: many of the Siberian fires have been damped out by the return of cool, wetter conditions. Here are the fire maps from the MODIS satellite for late June/early July and last week...a clear decline.

The European Center smoke (biomass burning) prediction system shows little coming over from Siberia to our area:

Lots of smoke over the equatorial regions of South American and Africa...the reason?   Lot of fires there!

To end, here is a nice shot of smoke coming through Snoqualmie Pass by Richard Burte: