The smoke plume from Canada’s wildfires has reached Ireland and can cause hazy skies and red/orange sunsets, according to Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
Their analysis of the severe blazes that have swept across Canada since May found the resulting emissions were the highest on record for the country on June 26.
Smoke from the fires left New York under an orange haze for days and has significantly degraded North America’s air quality.
Read more: Video shows smoke engulf New York skyline in brownish haze amid wildfires
Copernicus scientists say the plume started reaching across the Atlantic to the European coast in the second week of June.
And that long-range transport of smoke, such as this episode, tends to occur at higher altitudes where the atmospheric lifetime of air pollutants is longer, manifesting in more hazy skies with red/orange sunsets.
CAMS have been monitoring the smoke transport as well as the intensity and estimated emissions of the wildfires.
They added that a further increase in the intensity of the wildfires in Quebec and Ontario towards the end of last week (21-22 June) led to high values of aerosol optical depth and carbon monoxide in Europe, between 26-29 June.
It is not expected to have a significant impact on surface air quality but they continue to monitor fine particles resulting from the fires.
CAMS Senior Scientist, Mark Parrington, said: “Our monitoring of the scale and persistence of the wildfire emissions across Canada since early May has shown how unusual it has been when compared to the two decades of our dataset.
“The long-range transport of smoke that we are currently monitoring is not unusual, and not expected to have any significant impact on surface air quality in Europe, but it is a clear reflection of the intensity of the fires that such high values of aerosol optical depth and other pollutants associated with the plume are so high as it reaches this side of the Atlantic.”
