Smoke over Eastern Great Lakes

THUNDER BAY – Environment – Fire Crews from Ontario are helping to fight fires across Western Canada. 593 personnel from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry are currently on assignment in Alberta (107), British Columbia (348), Parks Canada – Alberta (13) and the Northwest Territories (125) to assist in forest fire management efforts. An Incident Management Team is scheduled to return to Ontario on the weekend at the completion of their 14-day deployment.

These personnel are from Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Services bases across the province and are FireRanger crews, Incident Management Team (IMT) members as well as specialists in areas such as fire behaviour analysis, liaison and helicopter coordination.

In addition to the personnel on fire assignment, Ontario is providing equipment including 400 power pumps, two thousand lengths of hose and two values protection units to British Columbia.

By the time of this report, one new fire was confirmed in the Northwest region. Nipigon District Fire Number 14 located north of Aroland First Nation is not under control at 0.2 ha. Red Lake District Fire Number 17 is still being monitored and is 124 hectares in size.

The degree of concern for fire behaviour is low in the south and moderate to high in the north. Friday July 25 will see increasing cloud with showers and a risk of thunderstorms as a system pushes into southern portions of the region with mainly sunny skies for the remainder of the region. The forecast for Saturday July 26 is mainly cloudy skies with showers and a risk of thunderstorms, except for the
far north.

Crews are West, Smoke is East

Canadian wildfires have been raging this summer and some of the smoke from those fires is drifting downward into the U.S. In this image collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on July 24, 2014 a swath of smoke has descended over the Great Lakes region of the United States. What is particularly interesting is the fire image from July 23, 2014 (first image feature highlighted below) clearly shows the path of the smoke as it drifts off southeastward. In the image, it is over Manitoba and parts of Ontario, and by the time this image was taken by Aqua, it had drifted across the Great Lakes.

There have been quite a few image features on NASA.gov recently highlighting the Canadian fires:

Smoke From Northern Territories Fires in Canada – July 24, 2014
Fires in the Northern Territories July 2014 – July 23, 2014
Fires and Smoke in Canada’s Northern Territories – July 21, 2014
Wildfires in Canada’s Northern Territories – July 15, 2014
Northwest Territories, Canada Wildfires – July 07, 2014

Credit: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption: NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner