Though if you hit up January and look at SO4 emissions over the US and Europe, they're pretty terrifying as well.
Spotting wildfires by PM2.5 emissions is a part-time hobby, as is looking at MSLP and watching cyclonic storms developing. It looks as if the Atlantic hurricane season may start cooking off in the next week or so.
Not all channels have forecast values, but temps, winds, pressures, and precip do, so you can roll out a few days to see what the models are projecting. I've followed (and anticipated) most of the big storms over the past few years. Some false starts (a lot of swirls never really develop), but it was painfully obvious that Harvy and Florence were going to be massive storms.
In the Pacific, the unrelenting assaults on the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China are impressive.
China tends to buy light crude instead of light sweet crude, hence the oil and derived fuels have more sulfur than is typical for European or American vehicles, industry, etc.
This is something of a problem when a country with as many people as China and an economy as growth-oriented as China's is, uh, firing on all cylinders.
Generally, I'll take a look at the PM2.5 channel on occasion. Swapping that for CO (carbon monoxide) is usually a good confirmation.
While wood smoke contributes a lot of PM2.5, other sources can as well -- dust over the Sahara (and much of the Atlantic), salt spray from hurricanes, and a few others, which aren't direction or at all combustion related.
CO tends to hover near urban areas -- you'll spot concentrations especially near Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.
Sulfur Dioxide is also related to combustion, usually heavy fuel oils. Shipping traffic lights up especially, but so do industrial sources (generators), many volcanos, and some others I haven't worked out.
Nullschool doesn't have an IR channel, but Nasa's Modis can turn that up. There are generally national or regional wildfire websites, particularly for the US, Canada, and Australia, as well as California and other western US states.
(Fire activity so far this year has been pretty low in the US.)
If you spend a few weeks looking at data (or browsing through historical data), you get a pretty good idea of what patterns are typical.
Note also: some sensors / channels get recallibrated from time to time. There was a big adjustment in CO2 measurements a year or so back, which kind of freaked me out. Whilst CO2 concentrations are gradually increasing, they did not take a massive jump in the past 5 years, despite appearing to do so from the Nullschool history.
Also, as noted, sometimes stuff shows up that's not fires. The current Ethiopian volcano erruption would be a case in point (I think it's a volcano, seems very likely).
Though if you hit up January and look at SO4 emissions over the US and Europe, they're pretty terrifying as well.
Spotting wildfires by PM2.5 emissions is a part-time hobby, as is looking at MSLP and watching cyclonic storms developing. It looks as if the Atlantic hurricane season may start cooking off in the next week or so.
Not all channels have forecast values, but temps, winds, pressures, and precip do, so you can roll out a few days to see what the models are projecting. I've followed (and anticipated) most of the big storms over the past few years. Some false starts (a lot of swirls never really develop), but it was painfully obvious that Harvy and Florence were going to be massive storms.
In the Pacific, the unrelenting assaults on the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China are impressive.