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Fires in California
A large number of wildfires in Northern California were burning in late June and July 2008 which had a big impact air quality in a large region. These figures show profiles of carbon monoxide from NASA's Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) shown on top of a NASA MODIS image of the smoke and fire locations. TES measures vertical profiles of ozone and carbon monoxide, and was taking a special set of dense observations across California on June 23. The colors correspond to the concentration of CO at different levels in the atmosphere, and we see that the highest concentrations are near the surface, and they become smaller at 5 to 6 km above the surface. Although the MODIS image is from two days later, it shows good correspondence between the smoke from the fires and the elevated carbon monoxideconcentrations due to the fires (more than 5 times what is typical) in the TES measurements.
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