Wildfire smoke pours across the United States Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory shows wildfire smoke from western North America pouring into the eastern United States.

According to NASA, haze darkened skies and reddened sunsets, unleashed a rash of code red and orange air quality warnings, and even left the smell of smoke in the air in some regions. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.

Some of the haziest skies can be seen in New York City, where fine particulate pollution has reached levels that are considered harmful – even for healthy people. New York City (NYC), often simply called New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2019 population of 8,336,817 distributed over about 302.6 square miles (784 km ), New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the State of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area. With almost 20 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and approximately 23 million in its combined statistical area, it is one of the world’s most populous megacities. New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, significantly influencing commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports, and is the most photographed city in the world.

Ryan Stauffer, an atmospheric scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that it’s a magnitude of particle pollution that New York City hasn’t seen in more than a decade.

The experts report that most of the smoke that has streamed into the eastern U.S. is likely from a cluster of fires near the border of the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario.

The image was captured on July 20 by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NOAA-20.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory 

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer