The unprecedented Canadian wildfires burning throughout the country this year, which have drifted smoke across continents, led to the highest emissions on record for the country by the end of June, according to a European weather monitoring service.
The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) said this wildfire season in Canada has led to a total of approximately 160 megatonnes of carbon emissions. That’s the highest level of emissions the weather monitoring service has on record for Canada in its data collection, called the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) dataset, which covers 2003 to present.
Emissions are the gases released into the atmosphere, which lead to air pollution.
“Our monitoring of the scale and persistence of the wildfire emissions across Canada since early May has shown how unusual it has been when compared to the two decades of our dataset,” said CAMS Senior Scientist, Mark Parrington, in a press release.
“The long-range transport of smoke that we are currently monitoring is not unusual, and not expected to have any significant impact on surface air quality in Europe, but it is a clear reflection of the intensity of the fires that such high values of aerosol optical depth and other pollutants associated with the plume are so high as it reaches this side of the Atlantic.”
An increase in the intensity of wildfires was sparked near the end of June in eastern Canada, leading to strong smokes moving across the North Atlantic and into Europe.
Between June 26 and 29, the smoke contained high values of aerosol optical depth and carbon monoxide, according to CAMS. The organization defines aerosol optical depth as a measure of the extinction effect of atmospheric aerosols — vital materials in the atmosphere — that is meant to assess the degree of air pollution.
The Canadian smoke spreading to Europe is not expected to have a significant impact on surface air quality, the CAMS notes.
The organization said it’s closely monitoring the particulate matter concentrations, the fine particles that can cause health risks when air quality is poor, which could add to local sources of air pollution in the EU.
By mid-July, the raging wildfires had burned a record-breaking 10 million hectares of land across the country, according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
As of Wednesday, the area burned had reached 12.1 million hectares of land. There were also 1,060 active fires.
Canada’s wildfire season started early this year due to the dry and hot weather conditions observed from coast to coast. There have been 4,765 fires reported across the country to date, spanning from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories to Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.
