New research from a team of scientists led by Cornell is transforming how researchers understand one of the

Wildfire smoke is stoking a new challenge for cleaner air. A NASA-supported study published Thursday found that, over the last decade, wildfires have worsened ground-level ozone pollution across much of the contiguous United States, creating unhealthy air far from active flames.

Wildfires have become an increasingly important contributor to ground-level ozone, or smog, across much of the United States, researchers report June 4 in the journal Science. Nationally, fires offset nearly four years’ worth of ozone-control gains, with larger setbacks in the West and Midwest.

Smoke often is associated with the soot, ash, and other fine particles that make the air look hazy. But wildfires also emit gases such as carbon monoxide, which can help form surface ozone in sunlight when other pollutants are present. Surface ozone is an invisible pollutant harmful to human health, plants, and crops. As smoke plumes travel and mix with other pollution, those reactions can drive ozone increases hundreds or even thousands of miles from active fires.

“NASA Earth observations, along with ground monitoring networks, help reveal air quality risks from wildfires that can cross state lines, giving air quality managers better decision-making information as wildfire smoke affects more communities,” said John Haynes, manager of NASA Earth Action’s Health and Air Quality program at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “This is a strong example of NASA science serving communities here in the U.S.”

Building a clearer ozone picture

High in the atmosphere, ozone shields Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Near the ground, however, ozone can irritate lungs, worsen asthma and other respiratory diseases, and increase health risks for children, older adults, outdoor workers, and people with existing health conditions.

To track surface ozone changes, researchers turned to deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that finds patterns across large datasets. They used it to build a first-of-its-kind dataset estimating daily surface ozone from 2003 to 2024 on a kilometer-by-kilometer grid — about 0.6 miles on each side — across the contiguous U.S. The work received support from NASA’s Health and Air Quality program and other NASA grants.

The scientists combined data from about 1,000 ground-based air quality stations with atmospheric model data, weather information, wildfire pollution data, and satellite-derived information, including products from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments.

Their analysis revealed two distinct periods. From 2003 to 2015, U.S. ground-level ozone generally declined as emissions of ozone-forming pollutants decreased. After 2015, however, those gains slowed or reversed in many places. By comparing estimated ozone levels with scenarios that removed wildfire influence, the researchers found that pollution from wildfires was a main factor in that shift.

Without the wildfire contribution, ground-level ozone in the Midwest, for example, would likely have continued to decline. Instead, wildfires erased about 5.3 years’ worth of ozone-control progress since 2015.

“People in the Midwest may think fires burning far away will not affect them,” said the study’s corresponding author Jun Wang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “But once wildfire pollution is in the air, it can move across regions. Pollution from one place can affect air quality in another.”

Measuring the health toll

The study also found that wildfire-driven ozone increased exposure to unhealthy air and likely contributed to premature deaths. Premature deaths associated with long-term wildfire-related ozone exposure in the U.S. increased by an estimated 318 deaths per year after 2013, with the post-2013 average 46% higher than in the previous decade. The researchers calculated premature deaths using average lifespan, ozone exposure estimates, and population density.

The 2023 Canadian wildfires showed how widely those risks can spread, with smoke-driven ozone increases stretching across the Midwest and into parts of the Northeast and South. Overall, from 2022 to 2024, wildfires exposed an additional 43 million people in the U.S. to conditions that did not meet current federal air quality standards for ozone, the researchers estimated.

Capturing that national picture is difficult from ground monitors alone. Ground monitors remain the backbone of U.S. air quality tracking, but they do not cover every community. NASA’s scientifically validated satellite observations and models help researchers and agencies see air quality patterns across states, regions, and fire seasons.

That broader air quality work includes newer missions such as TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution). Launched in 2023, TEMPO is NASA’s first mission to use a space-based spectrometer to provide hourly daytime measurements of air quality over North America. Its view is sharp enough to distinguish pollution patterns, including surface ozone, across areas only a few square miles wide, a major improvement over earlier satellites.

Together, these capabilities help researchers and agencies see smoke-related ozone patterns that might otherwise be harder to detect, especially in rural and remote areas.

The work also points toward a practical use of NASA science during fire season. Wang’s team has used NASA support to develop FireAQ, a decision-support system that brings satellite observations, model forecasts, and fire and aerosol products into weekly briefings with state and local air quality officials. The goal is to help officials see where smoke-related pollution may move next and give communities better information.

One of the first images transmitted back to Earth from the Artemis II mission was a stunner. In a single image, Earth’s full disk appears amid celestial phenomena that illustrate its place in the solar system. And although the visible hemisphere appears to be awash in sunlight, it is actually lit by moonlight. The astronauts’ vantage point provided a rare opportunity to capture nighttime features—most notably lights from human habitation—from a new perspective.

An Artemis crew member captured the photo from the Orion spacecraft after it completed the translunar injection burn, which sent the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory toward the Moon. In the photo, Earth eclipses the Sun from Orion’s perspective, leaving only a small sliver of its bright light visible around the bottom right edge. Green auroras, caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere, glow around the north and south poles (lower left and upper right, respectively).

The Sun’s light also produces the fuzzy glow, known as zodiacal light, that appears to the lower right of Earth. This phenomenon comes from sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. Skywatchers on Earth may see it at certain times of year around dawn or dusk as a faint column of light extending up from the horizon. Data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on its journey to Jupiter suggest that Mars may be a significant source of the dust particles that produce zodiacal light. Earth’s other planetary neighbor, Venus, appears as the bright object in the bottom right of the image.

On Earth itself, city lights are evidence of human activity. Bright areas appear in Spain, Portugal, and northern Africa (lower left), sub-Saharan Africa (center left), and Brazil (center right). Digital camera technology—with help from the illumination of a full Moon—made it possible to see these and other details of Earth’s surface and atmosphere in low light. The crew set the camera’s ISO to 51,200 to make it highly sensitive to light. For comparison, an ISO setting of 100 or 200 is common for daytime photography.

Previous nighttime views of Earth taken from spacecraft may look very different from this photo but have also inspired and enlightened. For instance, the Apollo 12 crew photographed Earth eclipsing the Sun in 1969; astronaut Alan Bean would go on to depict his impressions of the event in paintings.

More recently, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have photographed the planet at night from low Earth orbit, while NASA’s Black Marble nighttime lights product suite uses satellite observations to produce science-quality records of nighttime lights at daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. Those programs provide sustained data records, while the Artemis II photo is distinctive as a single human-captured full-disk view showing many low-light features at once.

Cindy Evans, senior exploration scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was working in the Science Evaluation Room during the Artemis II mission and was one of the first people on Earth to see the image. Evans was struck both by its beauty and the perspective revealed by all the visible solar system features. “I love the image so much because it was taken with Earth in moonshine, and shows Earth as a solar system body, a dynamic planet interacting with the solar wind, and a place harboring life,” she said.

The image is scientifically valuable, as well, said Miguel Román, Deputy Director for Atmospheres and Data Systems at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It speaks powerfully to the breadth of what NASA does across science and human exploration,” he said. Román studies artificial light at night, as viewed from space, as a measurable signal of human activity.

“[This photo] reminds us that Earth at night is visually compelling, physically complex, and scientifically underexplored,” Román said. “I see this image as a glimpse of what Earth science can become in the future.”

NASA images prepared for Earth Observatory by Lauren Dauphin. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

• NASA (2026, April 22) Advancing Earth Observation at NASA Since Release of Earthrise Photo. Accessed June 2, 2026.
• NASA (2026, April 3) Hello, World. Accessed June 2, 2026.
• NASA (2006, October 9) Astronaut Still Photography During Apollo. Accessed June 2, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2026, May 15) Picturing Earth in a New Light. Accessed June 2, 2026.
• NASA Image and Video Library (2026, April 3) Earth From the Perspective of Artemis II. Accessed June 2, 2026.

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