Deth

In the past, we’ve had smoke in the atmosphere from wildfires, but I can’t remember it being down to the surface before from fires that were hundreds of miles away.

We have a retrograding low in the right place at the right along with the trough in the east at the time to keep the flow coming from Canada, though. That same setup is what’s pumping in the dry air here. The grass isn’t even brown anymore. It’s mostly bleached tan, with a few stray patches that have found enough water.

Tuesday evening and night were bad. It was hazy and I could smell and taste smoke. Yesterday morning, that lessened around mid-morning. I did a WOD in it, then things improved. The sky had some blue, with the haze and cumulus clouds popping up.

The interesting thing was watching the satellite image of the smoke plume. You could see it settling southward, but along the northern and southern edge of it there were cumulus clouds popping up. My guess is either the smoke prevented enough heating to destabilize the atmosphere, or the temperature clash between the less smokey areas and those shrouded in the thick layer.

Late yesterday evening, the smoke moved back in and the air quality degraded pretty quickly. By midnight, the PM2.5 was pushing towards µg/m3. There was a visible haze outside and it contained to get worse overnight.

Eventually, this morning, the air quality got to the worst it was going to get. Visibility was easily less than a mile. My eyes were burning and my nose itching, along with my throat at its worst. The PM2.5 topped out at 453.2µg/m3 and PM10 at 507.8µg/m3 according to my indoor Ambient Weather air quality monitor. This was inside of our house.

When I woke up early this morning, about 4:20 AM, I went outside to check out the moon. I thought if it was visible, it might be orange or red. I wasn’t disappointed because it was visible. It was indeed a reddish orange color. I’ve only seen it this deep of a color near the horizon, but this was high in the sky. The moon was pretty close to the maximum elevation that it would reach today.

This morning, as expected, the sun was much, much dimmer than normal and more of a yellow color. This picture was a little over an hour after sunrise.