How Wildfire Smoke Drifts So Quickly

Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura

America’s coasts sit 3,000 miles apart, and are separated by differences both geological and philosophical.

But they sit under the same sky—and when disaster strikes on one edge, the air sometimes carries it to the other.

In the parched spring of 1935, dust blew eastward. New York newspapers wrote that Cleveland, Ohio, had been “darkened by a silt cloud” that dampened visibility. The air fouled over the New York cities of Albany and Corning, too, where residents reported an “acrid odor” in the “yellowish fog” that hid the hills. Now, after the Woolsey, Camp, and Hill Fires have scorched more than 200,000 acres in California over the past few weeks, residents father east are witnessing the tail effects.

The blazes’ most devastating consequences were felt nearby, of course, where the fires snatched lives, displaced families and animals, and reduced homes, attractions, and towns to rubble. But proof of them drifted through the sky—carried along the jet stream, high above the ground.

When plumes stretch several miles up in the atmosphere and are carried along the jet stream, they move pretty quickly through the air. At high altitudes, “smoke from the U.S. can reach Europe, and smoke from Siberia and Russia can drift to Canada and parts of the U.S.,” says Ravan Ahmadov, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who works on air modeling.

In August, smoke and particles from 15 fires burning across California reached New York, and smoke from billows in British Columbia drifted across Canada, and were visible from a satellite more than one million miles away.

As recent fires singed California, low winds held the smoke stagnant around the Central Valley, Ahmadov says. “The region probably had one of the worst air qualities…

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