LONG-RANGE TRANSPORT OBSERVATION OF TWO LARGE FOREST FIRES PLUMES TO THE NORTHEASTERN U.S.

Two large forest fires plumes, one from Russia and one from California were observed in 2003 over the east coast of the US using a wide suite of instruments including lidar on the ground, GLAS, MODIS, TOMS, AERONET and GOES-8. For the Russian fire plume, the smoke arrived in US mid-Atlantic states at a height of 3km. The California fires were much higher (10- 12km) and not obviously identified as smoke. This paper presents these serendipitous observations and discusses how to optimize the observation of such events in the future.