The wildfire smoke from Canada was quite noticeable this past weekend aloft over Iowa with a red/orange tint to the sunlight. Some of the smoke even reached the surface dropping air quality. The featured chart looks into the impact on solar radiation. The chart displays one minute solar radiation from the ISU Soil Moisture site near Crawfordsville (SE Iowa). The smoke aloft was present both days, but the amount / thickness varied. The relatively smooth curves on both days indicates the lack of clouds, which would have made the chart much more noisy. So we find radiation flux intensity differences ranging up to 150 Watts per meter squared. The upper right legend has the day long / integrated total. The radiation total on Sunday was about 10% less than Saturday, which was also below a theoretical clear sky maximum around 32 Megajoules.

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Tags:   smoke