Daily county-level fine-particulate (PM2.5) concentrations for 2016, paired with the date each county’s state first experienced a wildfire smoke plume that year. Smoke plumes arrive on different days in different places, so the first-smoke date is a staggered “treatment” you can stack around to study its effect on air quality. The high-frequency daily structure also makes it a useful stress test for building stacks on date variables rather than calendar years.
Codebook
Variable
Type
Description
fips
integer
County FIPS code
date
Date
Observation date (YYYY-MM-DD)
first_smoke_day
Date
Date the county’s state first saw a smoke plume in 2016
Di, Q., Wei, Y., Shtein, A., Xing, X., Castro, E., Amini, H., Hultquist, C., Shi, L., Kloog, I., Silvern, R., Kelly, J., Sabath, M. B., Choirat, C., Koutrakis, P., Lyapustin, A., Wang, Y., Mickley, L. J., Daouk, Y., & Schwartz, J. (2024). Daily and Annual PM2.5 Concentrations for the Contiguous United States, 1-km Grids, Version 1.10 (2000–2016). Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). doi:10.7927/G2N9-CA10 (accessed 2026-01-21).