Smoke From Hundreds of Wildfires in Canada Streams South Across Much of the Central United States

Smoke from hundreds of fires burning in Canada streamed far south into the U.S. on June 28, 2015, as seen in this image from NASA's Aqua satellite. (Source: NASA Worldview) |See update below | Pushed by a wildly contorted jet stream, smoke from more than 200 wildfires burning in Canada's Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces has streamed 1,600 miles south, deep into the United States. You can see the fires and the plume in the image above, acquired by NASA's Aqua satellite yesterday. I did my best to analyze the satellite image and locate the approximate end of the plume. By my estimate, it traveled as far south as southern Missouri, near the city of Springfield. From the fires in northern Alberta, that's a distance of about 1,600 miles. Here's another view, captured yesterday by a GOES weather satellite: