During June-August 2004, the NASA and NOAA held nearly coincident experiments designed to examine regional and continental scale transport of pollutants from the United States towards the Atlantic and Europe. While not all the authors above were officially a part of the INTEX or NEAQS experiments, measurements were taken from a number of sites in the Regional East Atmospheric Lidar Mesonet (REALM). This paper will discuss vertical profile measurements made by the lidar groups in REALM. Examples will be given whereby transport related events can be better located in the vertical dimension than from satellite imagery. We discuss how those measurements were used in flight planning. The transport of Alaska and British Columbia forest fire plumes were highly evident during this period and an analysis of events in early July provided evidence of the isentropic descent of northern forest fire plumes as they crossed into the US. An example of a similar event in 2003 fires from Siberia (Hoff et al., 2004) provides evidence that such downmixing may be a common feature associated with boreal forest fires.

Ref: R.M. Hoff, J. Engel-Cox, N. Krotkov, S. Palm, R. Rogers, K. McCann, L. Sparling, N. Jordan, O. Torres, J. Spinhirne, 2004. Long-Range Transport Observation Of Two Large Forest Fires Plumes To The Northeastern U.S., ESA Special Publication SP-561, European Space Agency, Nordvik, Holland.