Smoke from fires in the Pacific Northwest gets caught in a weather pattern and pulled all the way across the US and over to Europe. Hurricanes form off the coast of Africa and travel across the Atlantic to make landfall in the United States. Dust from the Sahara is blown into the Gulf of Mexico.
In this cool video created by NASA you visualize how dust, sand and other particulate matter moves with the wind from one continent to another. The video includes footage of 2017 hurricanes including Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Ophelia. (You too can create cool looking videos like this if you had the supercomputing resources like NASA.)
Brief story accompanying the video on NPR.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Friday November 17 2017, @05:48PM (1 child)
What is puffing up synchronously from the southeastern US? It happens a bit at the start, and a lot around 1:12 in [youtube.com].
Power plants, maybe?
(Score: 1) by koick on Saturday November 18 2017, @03:08AM
Folks on Reddit said the daily spurts of smoke in the southeastern USA are mostly controlled burns. Some said from prescribed burns of underbrush to prevent larger fires and others said of (sugar cane?) fields as part of the
harvest cycle.