(Might be wrong flair) Smoke from smaller campfires, house fires, etc go away after a while. Even though there is so much more smoke from the wildfires, how is it still able to travel across multiple states without going away?
Edit: Dissipate, not dissappear
In: 33
There’s more of it.
“Smoke” is a combination of gasses and particulates.
When you burn wood you get both complete and partial oxidation. That basically takes a bunch of the carbon in wood and attaches one or two oxygen atoms to it to produce carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. You also get a bunch of stuff that doesn’t turn into a gas but just gets degraded to tiny little particles. That stuff is the main part of smoke you can see and smell.
When the wind blows the smoke around it also mixes it with air around it.
You can see and smell smoke when the concentrations of those particulates are high enough. When you have a little campfire, those concentrations aren’t that high to begin with* and there’s a lot of clean air around it to dilute the smoke. When you have a giant forest fire, there are many more particulates in the first place and the wind tends to mix that air with smokey air from other parts of the forest fire.
*Forrest fires can actually burn more cleanly since the giant updrafts can oxygenate them well but the sheer mass of material that’s being burnt means you’ll have more particulates overall.
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