Smokey superlatives: widespread wildfire impacts seen from as far away as a million miles from Earth

I was going to take a break from covering the wildfires blazing across large swaths of western North America — until I checked on remote sensing data this morning and saw the satellite imagery above and lower down in this post.

In the the image above, captured by the Suomi-NPP satellite on Aug. 15, check out the thick, sandy-colored smudge of smoke blanketing a huge portion of western North America. At its greatest extents, I measure it at more than 1,000 miles west to east and 500 miles north to south.

In British Columbia, 559 fires burning as of Wednesday prompted the Canadian provincial government to declare a province-wide state of emergency for the second year in a row.