As Russia's Far East suffers from devastating fires in Siberia, the smoke reached the western coast of the U.S. and Canada. NASA reported that on Friday.
"The tracking of the smoke from those fires was captured by the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite of instruments (OMPS) on NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite on July 31/30. The first date on the image refers to west of the dateline (the Siberian portion of the image), the second date refers to the U.S./Canadian part", reads the story on the NASA website.
The agency quoted Colin Seftor, atmospheric scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; he noted that the smoke "can now be seen stretching across eastern Russia, into Alaska (maybe mixed with smoke from local fires), down the west coast of Canada (and over the eastern Pacific) and, then, over Vancouver and Seattle".
Flames engulfed over 3 million hectares of forests in ten regions of Russia's Far East; the situation now seems out of control, as the government decided not to extinguish the small fires at first. Then, the flames spread quickly, resulting in a massive disaster.
