Over the past few days, wildfire activity is being recorded at the area of Alberta, Canada. These severe fires resulted in intense pyro-cumulonimbus activity that uplifted smoke particles to the lower stratosphere.

Images from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) captured the path of the plume, which crossed over the Atlantic and reached Europe after almost 6 days of transport. EARLINET lidar stations have already reported the event. Observations made with the Polly XT lidar system of NOA-ReACT are presented in the figure below. The smoke plume is located at 11 to 12 km (red circle) above the local tropopause. This is already the third time smoke from North America is captured by ReACT lidar system in the stratosphere. These long-range transported smoke particles present a non-typical behavior in terms of their optical properties, which is being studied by ReACT.