Introduction
In early August 2024, extensive wildfire activity in western Canada generated a large smoke emission event, resulting in the long-range transport of biomass-burning aerosol and trace gases across North America and the North Atlantic towards Europe.
The smoke plume was entrained into the mid-latitude circulation from 12 August and reached western Europe by 17 August, with analyses from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) indicating enhanced aerosol optical depth (AOD) values exceeding 1 within the transported plume. These elevated AOD values were independently confirmed by AERONET observations at measurement sites across northwestern Europe and at locations upstream over the North Atlantic sector.
Vertical cross-sections of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen cyanide (HCN) revealed enhanced concentrations throughout the free troposphere over Europe, with some indications of near-surface influence. Surface observations across the UK and measurements from the vAirify project further identified elevated particulate matter concentrations (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) during 18–20 August, consistent with the arrival of the Canadian wildfire smoke plume.
Literature
The table below points to published materials related to this event that we are aware of.
| Publication | Title | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| CAMS News Article | Smoke from Canadian wildfires reaches Europe | https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/smoke-canadian-wildfires-reaches-europe, 20 August 2024 |
| EGUsphere Pre-Print | Wildfire aerosols lofted by North American pyrocumulonimbus clouds: long-range transport and aerosol-cloud-radiative effects | Wang, Y., et al. (2025), https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5076. |
OpenIFS Experiments
We provide experiment data packs that allow the simulation of a time period within the described event by conducting an OpenIFS forecast experiment with interactive atmospheric composition.
The pack includes the global initial experiment data and boundary conditions, including time-varying wildfire emissions, for a forecast from 12 August 2024 with a duration of 15 days.
The data is provided on the N80 horizontal model grid (T159) which has approximately 125km / 1.125 degree grid spacing, and on 137 vertical model levels.
The experiment can be run as a free-running forecast experiment, or alternatively with synoptic meteorology constrained by nudging towards six-hourly ECMWF ERA5 reanalyses.
We provide plotting scripts using the ECMWF earthkit Python package to generate plots from the OpenIFS model outputs.
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