Wildfires Blazing in Northern Canadian Forests Send Plumes of Smoke More than a Thousand Miles South to Colorado

Smoke plumes are visible from multiple wildfires burning in the Northern Territories in this image captured by NASA's Terra Satellite this afternoon. (Click to enlarge.) Red dots mark places where the satellite detected fire. The Great Slave Lake is visible toward the bottom portion of the image. (Source: NASA) More often than not, the morning light I wake up to here in Colorado is pure, brilliant, even sharp. But for the past two mornings, the morning light has reminded me of Los Angeles in October — soft, yellow-golden in color, clearly filtered through a scrim of something suspended in the air. This is usually a sign that a wildfire is burning somewhere relatively nearby. So on both mornings I stepped out onto my deck and sniffed the air. Nothing. But it turns out that smoke has indeed been filtering the light here — and across a significant portion of both Canada and the United States.