As Canada battles another intense wildfire season, smoke is again drifting across the border, triggering health concerns across the U.S. But a major shift in air quality monitoring may soon help communities respond faster and more accurately. Scientists have developed a new satellite-based method that tracks wildfire smoke in three dimensions, offering neighborhood-level data on how close smoke is to the ground where it poses the greatest health risk.
Until recently, satellites could only provide 2D snapshots of smoke plumes, without showing how high the smoke sat in the atmosphere. That was a major limitation. High-altitude smoke might look threatening in images but doesn’t always impact the air we breathe. In contrast, when smoke hugs the surface, it carries hazardous fine particles known as PM2.5 into people’s lungs worsening asthma, heart disease, and other respiratory conditions.
The breakthrough comes from NASA’s 2023 satellite TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution). Using light absorption data, scientists can now estimate the altitude of smoke plumes. When smoke is lower in the atmosphere, oxygen molecules absorb more sunlight at a specific wavelength (688 nanometers). This gives researchers a way to distinguish surface-level threats from harmless high-flying smoke.
By pairing TEMPO data with NOAA GOES-R satellite imagery, researchers can now generate real-time 3D maps showing exactly how close wildfire smoke is to the ground and where it’s headed next. A prototype platform called FireAQ is already being tested, though it’s currently limited to one update per day and can’t detect smoke when cloud cover is heavy.
This 3D smoke monitoring could be a game-changer. Traditional ground-based air quality sensors are sparse and clustered mostly in urban areas leaving large rural regions in the dark. For example, Iowa has just 50 monitoring stations across more than 56,000 square miles. The new satellite approach offers full coverage with pinpoint accuracy, alerting residents who might otherwise miss the danger.
Wildfire smoke is now one of the fastest-rising public health threats in North America. While emissions from cars and factories have dropped sharply since 2000, wildfires intensified by climate change and urban expansion into forested areas have reversed air quality progress in many western U.S. states.
With wildfire seasons growing longer and more dangerous, this satellite innovation arrives just in time. It gives forecasters and public health officials the tools they need to respond more quickly, more precisely, and ultimately, to save lives.