Tonnes of Smoke Over Perth

This shot was taken a smidgen after sunset on Anzac day the 25th of April (the sun has set in the extreme right of the picture), 2010. It was taken from Ozone Terrance in Kalamunda, which, for those not sure where Kalamunda is relative to Perth, is on the edge of the Darling Scarp to the East of Perth. Obviously, as it is more-or-less a sunset picture, it was taken from east looking west.

It shows the city of Perth, Western Australia, buried in a dense smoke band. The following picture shows the smoke band to the south and north with the city of Perth—which is just identifiable slightly to the left of centre.

I apologise for the washed out look of this picture but, as anyone who has done panorama stitching will know (using multiple pictures blended into one super-wide picture), you have to adjust the exposure across all pictures so that they will blend. Also it is a *very* rough panorama. At any photography club this would be lucky to get one point out of the three points allocated to technical skill; but honestly I didn’t really plan to do a pano (panorama) when I zoomed down there with my camera to capture this—otherwise I would have taken a tripod and manually set the exposures so they were all taken with the same exposure settings.

From what I can gather this smoke, which has been around for two days now, is coming from a massive controlled burn by CALM (the Western Australian department of Conservation and Land Management) in the Dwellingup area.

Hmmm. I wonder how many tonnes of carbon have come from this fire? And, how many cars-on-the-road-per-year it would be equivalent to? Any environmental and mathematics experts reading this? I actually would like to know.

To open a less compressed (JPG compression only 5%) 1550 pixel wide version of the panno in a new Tab then Ctrl+Click (Shift+Click for Opera users) on the panno above. This opens a 340KB file so it might take a few seconds to fully open. If you have a 1680x1050 16:10 wide-screen display—and who doesn't these days?—then this panno will fit across the screen.