Coming home from Mass Sunday night, I saw what you see in the picture above — a strange, dull, red sun in a hazy sky, far too high to be that color.
Stopping at a light to take the picture, I pointed out that there was an odd haze in the air, “and not a purple one, either.” It wasn’t just the sun; it was barely detectable as I looked down Sunset Boulevard ahead of me. I asked my wife to check her weather apps.
She said one of them reported that wildfire smoke could be expected Monday morning. “Well, it’s here now.”
I suppose it’s a measure of how little I pay attention to news these days, so when I ran across this in The Washington Post this morning, I had to look for something tying it to South Carolina. I found this:
Smoke from Canadian wildfires moved into the Palmetto state this weekend. Most of the smoke particles and ozone associated with the fires are present at higher elevations in the atmosphere, but the added pollution from the fires also contributes to an increase in ground level ozone. Local weather conditions are also contributing to an increasing in ground level ozone. The stable layer of air near the surface and the light winds in the upstate Monday are preventing mixing and allowing ozone levels to build up.
I guess that’s what it was. There was a time when I would have been aware of this earlier, not because of looking for it, but because, well, local newspapers used to go sort of nuts over weather phenomena, so I couldn’t miss it. No more.
But the world is still with us, whether covered or not. Interesting that I could see what was happening in Manitoba just driving through West Columbia. Perhaps that red sun had given me, temporarily, one of Superman’s powers.
At least we’re not in North Dakota, something for which I am constantly grateful, whenever the place comes to mind. Which isn’t all that often…
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Odd… we had just walked on the Columbia riverwalk for about an hour before this. I don’t remember noticing a haze.
You don’t suppose Columbia has found a way to keep unpleasant weather phenomena on our side of the river, do you? If so, I missed when they did it. Maybe they staged all that hullabaloo over “conversion therapy” to distract us from what they were up to…