A new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology has found that wildfires are occurring every year
According to the study, about 25 million people in the U.S. were exposed to wildfire particles on a "particularly inauspicious day" in 2020."That is, these are only those people who have been exposed to smoke fromwildfires on a so-called extreme day," Marshall Burke, one of the study's co-authors and a scientist at Stanford University, told Earther.
Number of people in the US exposed todangerous levels of particles associated with wildfires, which the study classifies as PM2.5 concentrations of at least 100 micrograms per cubic meter, have increased more than 27-fold over the past decade. The number of people exposed to extreme levels of wildfire smoke pollution has increased by 11,000 times over this time. These days, the concentration of PM2.5 reached 200 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
Burke and other researchers studied satelliteshots of smoke from wildfires from 2006 to 2020. They compared the images with data from air quality monitors to see if the spikes in pollution matched wildfire smoke. However, air quality monitors are unevenly distributed across the country, so the scientists filled in the data gaps by training a machine learning model to use satellite data to accurately predict PM2.5 concentrations.
They also found that high-income and Hispanic communities were disproportionately affected by smoke particles from wildfires.