Satellite data shows that smoke from ongoing forest fires in Canada has flown across the Atlantic and spread to Europe, with other smoke expected to continue to spread this week.
On June 3, the European Cadre Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) said that the first smoke wave arrived in the Mediterranean on May 18, and a larger one had covered northwestern Europe.
In Canada, many large, uncontrolled fires are still raging from areas from British Columbia to Ontario, forcing more than 17,000 people in Manitoba to evacuate, along with thousands others in neighboring areas.
Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at camS, said the long-distance movement of these clouds reflects the scale and severity of the fires taking place in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
In Europe, forest fire smoke is expected to cause the sky to turn blurred and sunset to orange-red, but will not seriously affect the air quality near the ground because the smoke is mainly at high-altitude.
In addition to flying to Europe, smoke from the forest fires is also spreading southeast to other parts of Canada and the midwest of the United States, causing "harmful" air quality in some places.
According to the Canada Forest Fire Information System, forest fires this year have burned 2.1 million hectares of forest. The risk of forest fires is extremely high in many areas due to hot, dry and strong winds - factors that are becoming more serious due to human-caused climate change.
The fires also emitted a large amount of global warming gas: camS estimates that as of June 2, forest fires in Canada emitted 56 million tons of carbon. This is the second highest level for this time of year, after only 2023 - when a record for forest fire area was set.
