Madrid (EFE).- The smoke from the more than one hundred fires that are devastating Canadian forests has passed through the Iberian Peninsula and has reached Italy, but it is not expected to have a significant impact on surface air quality in Europe, according to the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS).
The smoke from the forest fires in Canada reached the northwest of Spain and Portugal on Monday, passed through Madrid, this Wednesday it has covered most of the Peninsula and has also reached the Canary Islands.
These suspended particles have veiled the sky in different parts of Spain, such as Galicia, Extremadura, Andalusia or Madrid, and have even entered the Mediterranean, as far as Italy.
This was explained this Wednesday by the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) from its Twitter account, in a publication in which it also pointed out that this phenomenon could have caused the temperatures registered on Tuesday “to be slightly lower than expected”.
“What happens in certain areas of the planet can end up being noticed in very distant places,” Aemet highlighted on Monday in another tweet in which it shared a satellite image stating that “smoke from the fires in Canada reaches the Iberian Peninsula ”, while “further south, you can see the dust in suspension from the Sahara”.
Displacement of masses of suspended particles
This Wednesday, two episodes have been added in the Canary Islands that respond to the displacement of masses of suspended particles: on the one hand, the aerosols generated by the Canadian burns and, on the other, the haze in which the islands are immersed.
There, this Thursday could be the day on which this conjunction of haze and ash particles is more pronounced, as detailed to EFE by the territorial delegate of the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) in the Canary Islands, David Suárez.
Meanwhile, the Canarian government, with jurisdiction over air quality, is trying to determine what proportion of desert aerosols are generated by haze and what proportion is of particles linked to Canadian fires.
According to CAMS, the new increase in the intensity of the forest fires in Canada towards the end of last week, caused a global episode of “particularly important long-distance movement of smoke across the North Atlantic”, which has reached Europe. .
The specialists of this service specify that “a long-distance movement of smoke such as that of this episode tends to occur at higher altitudes, where the permanence of the pollutants in the atmosphere is longer and whose manifestation is usually in the form of hazy skies with reddish or orange sunsets”, so “the projected smoke drift is not expected to have a significant impact on surface air quality”.
Worst wildfire season in Canada
The North American country registers its worst season of forest fires in history, with some 76,000 square kilometers burned in the east and west; a greater burned area than the combined years of 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022, according to the Canadian Inter-Agency Center for Wildland Fire.
Canadian authorities have pointed directly to the climate crisis as responsible for the high number of fires, as well as their size.
The Donnie Creek fire, the largest in the history of British Columbia in Canada, has destroyed nearly 575,000 hectares of forest, a dimension that has led those responsible for the extinction services of the province to give up continuing to fight the fire and they are confident that it will die out in the winter with the arrival of rain and snow.