When Something In The Sky Seems Odd

File this post under miscellaneous drivel.

I am a very habitual person.  When I get into a routine, it's hard for me to break it.  Ever since getting into meteorology, I've gotten into the habit of checking the morning and evening soundings for the DFW and surrounding areas.  Soundings can show a great deal about the vertical makeup of the atmosphere.  Here are the morning soundings for today - February 9, 2015.

 

 

 

As the pictures indicate by the wide spacing between the red (temperature) and green (dew point) lines, the air in the DFW region is very dry - much too dry for clouds to form.  However, when I picked up my oldest daughter from theater practice tonight, I noticed this to my north.

 

 

The whole time I was looking at this, I kept thinking to myself, "This shouldn't be there.  What's going on?"  I also couldn't get over that distinctive arrowhead shape.

 

When I arrived home, I pulled up the 1KM visible satellite feed and got the answer to my question.  The "cloud" wasn't really a cloud at all, rather a smoke plume from southern Oklahoma - originating some 115 miles away!

 

This was the visible satellite image from 2230Z (5:30 PM CST)

 

 

The squiggly blue line running west to east is the Red River, which is the border between Texas and Oklahoma.  About midway though the Red River is a white/gray plume of smoke running from the northwest and blowing southeast.  Here's another view to give you an idea of scale.

 

 

The image from 45 minutes later - (2315Z, or 6:15 PM CST), showed from above exactly what I had snapped from ground level. 

 

 

Easily visible in this image is that same arrowhead shape that I had seen from below.  When running the animation loop of the visible satellite feed, I noticed that this wasn't the only fire in Oklahoma today - but this was certainly the most prominent.  In other parts of the state, I read that the forest service were doing controlled burns in some of their forest preserves.  There didn't look to be a forest preserve near the origin of this fire so I'm not entirely sure of the cause.  So, while not earth shattering, I thought it was kind of cool to correlate a photo taken on the ground with an image from a satellite orbiting roughly 22,000 miles above the ground!!