We examine space-based observations of stratospheric aerosol to infer the presence of episodic smoke perturbations. We find that smoke's optical properties often show a consistent behavior but vary somewhat from event to event. We also find that the rate of smoke events observed in the 1984–2005 period is about half the rate of similar observations in the period from 2017 to the present; however, with such low overall rates, inferring change between the periods is difficult.