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Have you ever sat by a crackling campfire and lean back to watch the gray sooty smoke rise up into the night sky?

Then maybe the wind shifted a bit and it headed toward you, making you cough and scoot your chairway.

Have you ever wondered exactly? making you cough and scoot your chair away.

Have you ever wondered exactly what was in that smoke?

It turns out, smoke is made up of gases and these teeny tiny particles called aerosols.

So aerosol is sort of a blanket term to refer to particulate matter that's suspended in the atmosphere.

So your campfire produces aerosol pollution on a small scale, enough to make you a little uncomfortable.

Now, think about what a raging wildfire would generate.

A lot of what's emitted from a fire is particles or gases that turn into particles.

We think about bad air quality days, downwind from a big smoke event or something like that.

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