Forest Fire Effects on Air Quality in Ontario: Evaluation of Several Recent Examples

Several events were studied to examine the sources of smoke and pollutants that may affect air quality in Ontario as well as the transport mechanisms that result in effects on ground-level air quality. The selected events were strongly suspected of being influenced by forest fire smoke plumes and the evaluation of the events in this study confirmed (to a high degree of confidence) that smoke made a contribution to the measured pollutants. The main satellite-based remote-sensing product that correlated well with wildfire smoke plumes was carbon monoxide column amount.