The smoke from the wildfires of the West Coast in the United States was shown reaching as far as Europe, as per the satellite monitoring agencies in Europe. Currently, fires across California continue to burn, having scorched over 3.2 million acres of the Golden State.
The fires have extended as far as Washington State, which is isolated from California by Oregon, with the latter also experiencing the power of the blaze. Now, European scientists found that the density of the smoke is so astonishing that it has reached Europe.
Observations from the EU’s Copernicus climate tracking satellite has discovered that the smoke is messing with the air quality up to 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles) away, getting all the way to northern Europe. The smoke managed to reach the European shores because of the jet stream that carried it east, throughout the United States and over to the Atlantic to get to Europe.
The Wildfires Released Over 30 Million Tons of CO2 in the Atmosphere
NY Metro Weather said that the smoke was definitely visible in the skies over New York on Tuesday, September 15th. New data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) showed that the fires are tens to hundreds of times more powerful than the recent average.
The report also stated that the blazes had produced over 30 million tons of carbon dioxide since mid-August.
Mark Parrington, CMAS senior scientist, and wildfire expert said: “The scale and magnitude of these fires are at a level much higher than any of the 18 years that our monitoring data covers [since 2003]. The fact that these fires are emitting so much pollution into the atmosphere that we can still see thick smoke over 8000 kilometers away reflects just how devastating they have been in their magnitude and duration.”
NASA also published a statement in which it said scientists are at a ‘loss for words’ to describe the wildfires that have provoked the death of at least 33 people across the western U.S.
