Smoke Plume From Alaska, Canada Covering Parts of Montana

Aug. 17, 2004
Smoke smudging Montana horizons from the Continental Divide east is coming from wildfires in Alaska, Canada's Northwest Territories and Washington state, according to a National Weather Service meteorologist.

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (AP) -- Smoke smudging Montana horizons from the Continental Divide east is coming from wildfires in Alaska, Canada's Northwest Territories and Washington state, according to a National Weather Service meteorologist.

Montana has no major forest fires.

``You'd be amazed how big that smoke plume from Alaska is,'' said meteorologist Jim Brusda of the Great Falls office. ``It goes all the way to Kansas City.''

The smoke is coursing southeast out of Alaska, Brusda said Monday.

It extends from the Rocky Mountain Front of Montana to Minneapolis at the east edge, up to Hudson Bay and down over the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas.

The smoke is primarily over Montana's central and eastern regions.

Brusda estimated that 75 to 80 percent of the smoke in Montana was from Alaska and the Northwest Territories. The other smoke is largely coming from wildfires in central Washington, he said.

Alaska's fires are concentrated in the interior eastern portion of the state, with one group of fires covering nearly 2 million acres, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise, Idaho.

The Washington state fires are largely on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest near the town of Leavenworth.

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