Thick smog over Beijing
Thick smog blanketed China's capital city, Beijing, for many days, as seen by Metop-A.
Severe haze over Asia
23 October 2015 03:00 UTC
Haze from Indonesian forest fires spread across large parts of Asia in October.
Last Updated
14 September 2022
Published on
23 October 2015
By Ian Mills
The Meteosat-7 visible imagery (Figure 1, right frame), 23 October 03:00 UTC, shows extensive haze over large parts of Asia. Comparing it to the infrared image at the same time you can distinguish the haze from the cloud.
Stations in the area were reporting haze or smoke haze with visibility around 2000–4000 metres, but some stations were reporting visibility as low as 800 metres in smoke haze.
An inversion was trapping the haze at relatively low levels. However, on the island of Java several darker circles can be seen along the spine of the island where the mountain tops are higher than the inversion, so the mountain tops are visible through the clean air above the inversion.
Image comparison
Visible image from 23 October showing the extent of the haze
Figure 1: Comparison of Meteoetsat-7 images showing the extent of the haze.
