Boulder scientists join major study of smoke from western wildfires

There will be an additional plane in the air over wildfires in the northwestern United States in coming weeks, but it won't be there trying to put them out. The C-130 research aircraft flying to Boise, Idaho, from the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield on Friday will be taking to the skies over those blazes to foster a better understanding of their impact on air quality, weather patterns and longer-term climate change.

Billed as the Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption and Nitrogen, and less awkwardly as WE-CAN, the project is led by Colorado State University, with significant support from Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research, and is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Read more at the Boulder Daily Camera, 19 July 2018 . . .