RUSH: I just got — actually, it was sent to me yesterday after the program, might have been last night — the most amazing satellite picture. Roy Spencer, the official climatologist of the EIB Network, sent me an image from the NASA satellite Aqua. The resolution is so great, the picture is so big, I have a 30-inch monitor here, and the picture is too big for that. So you have to scroll to see it. It’s a picture taken right over California and the Baja peninsula, and it shows the effect of the Santa Ana winds. All of these forest fires are visible in terms of the smoke, and all the fires are designated by little red rectangles. You can see the Santa Ana winds just blowing the smoke straight out over the Pacific Ocean. If you scroll down to Baja, the Baja peninsula, to illustrate just how strong the Santa Ana winds are, you can see a very visible and very large streak of dust from the deserts of the Baja peninsula being whipped up by Santa Anas from the middle of the peninsula. I’m not talking about dust from the western shores of the Baja peninsula, I’m talking about from the middle of the Baja peninsula, and you can see the wind just whipping this dust up in a stream straight out over the Pacific much farther south than the smoke from the fires. Just an amazing, an amazing satellite picture that illustrates — the resolution is one thing, it’s incredible, but to see the smoke and the dust and the effects of the Santa Ana winds, and if you understand the effect of winds and fires and putting them out, you realize what a massive, massive, massive task still awaits everybody that’s involved in the fire-fighting effort.
Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama