What's going on with the fires in Florida?

Question

It's so smokey here. Even my house smells of smoke. It made me throw up just to walk outside! What IS going on?

Answer 1

I live near Cocoa Beach and we have about a 600 acre brush fire over here. More than 13,000 acres have burned in the Cocoa, Malabar and Palm Bay areas since Sunday. Forty single-family homes and two mobile homes were destroyed, with dozens of other homes damaged. There is also a fire in the everglades. You didn't say where you live in Florida but that's probably why you smell the smoke. You haven't heard about it on the news? It's been all over local T.V. I got evacuated on Monday and Tuesday, very scary.

Answer 2

i got this interesting article while searching about your answer.. i dont live in Florida but from the article i found that.. smoke and fog are a common problem in Florida especially south Florida. It usually happens from late Fall to early Spring.

Wildfires, as well as controlled burning for agricultural and land management purposes, can produce large areas of smoke over the rural interior of South Florida. This occurs primarily during the drier months from November to May. While most of the burning occurs in remote areas and has little impact on the population.

and now about the fog:

The Earth constantly radiates infrared energy into the atmosphere. On nights when there is little cloud cover to absorb and scatter this energy, it radiatiates into space. This is called radiational cooling, since it tends to cool the ground in the process. The cooling ground in turn cools the ground immediatly above it. Given sufficient low level moisture, this allows the water vapor in the air close to the ground to condense into tiny cloud droplets. In other words, the water vapor (an invisible gas), cools and turns into a mist of suspended drops of water (fog). This is the main mechanism for fog formation in South Florida. Winds tend to disrupt this process by allowing the cooling moist air near the ground to mix with warmer and often drier aloft. This type of fog is classified as radiational fog.

The second mechanism for fog production in South Florida is advection fog. "Advection" is what meteorologists call the movement of air along a surface. Advection fog occurs when warm. moist air off the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic moves (or "advects") over a cooler land surface. This happens occasionally during the Spring when maritime air is gradually warming, but air over the land is still influenced by periodic cold fronts. As with radiation fog, the cooling moist water vapor condenses into fog. This is often responsible for fog formation over the southwest coast of Florida. Sometimes fog is formed by a combination of both processes.

Answer 3

Arson, if you believe what they say on TV.