Flames engulfed over 3 million hectares of forests in ten regions of Russia's Far East; the situation now seems out of control, as the government decided not to extinguish the small fires

Axar.az reports citing foreign media that as Russia's Far East suffers from devastating fires in Siberia, the smoke reached the western coast of the U.S. and Canada.

The tracking of the smoke from those fires was captured by the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite of instruments (OMPS) on NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite on July 31/30. The first date on the image refers to the west of the dateline (the Siberian portion of the image), the second date refers to the U.S./Canadian part.

The agency quoted Colin Seftor, atmospheric scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; he noted that the smoke "can now be seen stretching across eastern Russia, into Alaska (maybe mixed with smoke from local fires), down the west coast of Canada (and over the eastern Pacific) and, then, over Vancouver and Seattle".