The smoke from US West Coast wildfires is visible from nearly 1 million miles away (photo) - Space.com

The smoke wafting from the wildfires raging across the Western United States is a wrenching sight, even from nearly a million miles away.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), which orbits the sun in a gravitationally stable spot 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

Related: Raging California wildfires spotted from space (photos, video).

The smoke is bad over terra firma as well, blanketing much of California, Oregon and Washington state.

For example, 330,000 acres (133,500 hectares) burned in Washington on Monday (Sept. 8) alone, Gov.

And wildfires have burned more than 3.1 million acres (1.25 million hectares) in California since the beginning of the year, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CALFIRE) wrote in an update Friday (Sept. 11). .

"This year’s acres burned is 26 times higher than the acres burned in 2019 for the same time period, and the combined amount of acres burned is larger than the state of Connecticut," CALFIRE officials wrote.

The raging fires are driven by high temperatures and dry conditions throughout the West.