Smoke from Asia

The last few days have been quite smokey. Here's a look from the Suncrest camera:

April 20, 2015

And a Satellite image:

April 18, 2015

It's a little early in the year for summer pollution, so what is this gunk in our air? It's from Asia. Many brush fires got out of control due high winds. In the satellite image below you can see the massive smoke plume. Each red dot is a surface hot spot identifying the location of fires.

April 14, 2015

It only takes a couple days for air over Asia to reach the United States.

Backward trajectories show that the air over the Eastern US was over Asia just a few days earlier.