Where there’s fire,
there’s smoke.
But smoke can also travel far beyond a burning fire. It blows across continents and oceans,
altering air quality and affecting weather patterns.
What happens when that smoke mixes with the atmosphere — where it goes,
what exactly it carries, and how it affects people and ecosystems — is important
and ongoing research. Enter NASA, NOAA
and university partners, working from airplanes, mobile research laboratories
and ground stations to follow particles of smoke produced by fires
across the United States. The mission? It’s called
the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality,
or FIREEx-AQ, for short.
Generally, the goal is to track smoke as it crosses North America, taking air samples
ranging from high in the sky to down on the ground where people are breathing it.
These measurements will help answer some big questions, like:
What’s in the smoke? How do fires affect air quality across North America?
What are some of the long-term affects of smoke from
these fires? And importantly, how can satellites help us
answer these questions? There are a few stops along the way.
First up: Boise, Idaho. From Boise,
the FIREEx-AQ team will deploy throughout the U.S., taking measurements
of smoke from wildfires.
Next up, the team heads to Salina, Kansas, to focus on smoke from agricultural fires,
looking at the unique composition of chemicals in these small, managed burns.
Finally, all this data comes back to the lab
where researchers put it into computer models, improving forecasts of where smoke
travels, and what it carries, as fires burn across North America.
FIREEx-AQ is just one of NASA’s many
missions studying fires and how they’re changing with our planet.
From the ground, the air and space, we’re keeping a close eye on Earth
and how it burns.
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