Global Transport of Australian Bushfire Smoke

In this video, different aerosols are highlighted by color, including dust (orange), sea salt (blue), nitrates (pink) and carbonaceous (red), with brighter regions corresponding to higher aerosol amounts.
January 21, 2020
CreditNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Language
  • english

January 21, 2020

This animation shows several high impact events across the globe between August 2019 and January 2020, including Hurricane Dorian (August to September 2019), major fire events in South America and Indonesia (August to September 2019), and extreme wildfires in Australia (December 2019 to January 2020).

The local impacts of the Australian bushfires have been devastating to property and life in the country, while producing extreme air quality impacts throughout the region.

As smoke from the massive fires has interacted with global weather, the transport of smoke plumes around the globe has accelerated into the upper troposphere and even the lowermost stratosphere, leading to long-range transport around the globe.

The smoke from these bushfires will travel across the Southern Ocean, completing a global circumnavigation back around to Australia, and is particularly pronounced across the southern Pacific Ocean out to South America.