RAQDPS FireWork · 2002–2023
Wildfire smoke in motion
Hourly transport of wildfire-attributable carbonaceous smoke over western North America, from May through September.
Choose a year to follow the plume through the fire season. Indigo points mark RGI v7 glaciers beneath the smoke field.
Smoke animation player
This year’s animation is temporarily unavailable.The video archive is being restored. In the meantime, the interactive atlas remains available.
Open the interactive atlas01
What the animation shows
The smoke field approximates wildfire PM2.5 as the sum of elemental carbon, primary organic carbon and secondary organic carbon in the FireWork simulation, minus the same tracers in the no-fire simulation. Subtracting the paired runs removes the non-fire background.
Frames use the model’s native rotated-pole grid at hourly resolution. The colour scale follows Environment and Climate Change Canada’s PM2.5 Differences visual convention.
Return to the research project