Aerosols from 2003 Southern California Fires

  • Credit

    NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Aerosols from 2003 Southern California Fires (WMS)

A devastating series of fires occurred in Southern California during October 2003. The effects of these fires were detectable from space. The Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) instrument measures aerosol particles (microscopic airborne dust and smoke). TOMS was able to detect aerosols from these fires moving West over the Pacific Ocean and East over the continental United States.

This animation shows aerosol index over the western US from Oct 23 through November 1, 2003. Each image pixel corresponds to an area 1 degree in longitude by 1.25 degrees in latitude.

Metadata

  • Sensor

    TOMS/TOMS

  • Animation ID

    3132

  • Start Timecode

    00:00:00:00

  • End Timecode

    00:00:00:00

  • Animator

    Jeff DeLaBeaujardiere

  • Studio

    SVS

  • Visualization Date

    2005/03/11

  • Scientist

    Paul Newman (NASA/GSFC), Pawan K. Bhartia (NASA/GSFC)

  • Datasets

    Aerosols

  • Keywords

    GCMD--EARTH SCIENCE--Atmosphere--Aerosols--Aerosol Radiance, GCMD--Instrument--TOMS--Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer, GCMD--Platform--EP-TOMS--Earth Probe-TOMS

  • DLESE Subject

    Atmospheric science

  • Imagemods

    Gaps with missing data were interpolated. Each frame was smoothed spatially, and the eastern (before midnight) edge of each frame was smoothed with the western (after midnight) edge of the following day's frame. The area of interest was extracted, expanded and smoothed. Low aerosol values (index less than 1) were made transparent.

  • Story URL

    http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/aerosols/aerosols.html

  • Animation Type

    Regular