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| The Victorians ("Painted Ladies") of Alamo Square (maybejb) |
Over one day later Bay Area residents are still buzzing about
Wednesday's orange skies:
The otherworldly phenomenon was a result of smoke from multiple wildfires burning in Northern California, Oregon and Washington blowing into the Bay Area.
The wind pushed it to lower elevations, where it rested atop the foggy marine layer. The sun filtering through produced ominous shades of orange and red.
Though omnipresent, the ominous orange did not correlate with poor air quality.
the air quality was moderate in much of the Bay Area for most of the day.
“People were seeing the reddish orange skies and thinking the worst, but in actuality today’s air quality is worse,” said Walter Wallace, Bay Area Air Quality Management District spokesman, on Thursday. “The smoke has fallen today.”
A very unusual sky shouldn’t necessarily make people think the air quality is hazardous, he said.
“We’ve had much worse air quality days and didn’t have nearly as crazy a sky as we did yesterday,” Wallace said.
To the
list of apocalyptic afflictions and warnings (crime, homelessness, COVID-19, unemployment, school closures, business closures, heat waves, power failures, lightning, wildfires, and polluted air) we can add an orange sky that no one had seen before. And 2020 has nearly four months to go...
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| Situation normal, nothing to worry about (Chron photo) |
BTW, in case you missed it, a pyrocumulonimbus cloud appeared over Northern California:
That’s the name for a rare formation that NASA dubbed “the fire-breathing dragon of clouds.” It occurs when the scorched air from within a wildfire or volcano meets moist, buoyant air a few miles above the earth. The resulting mass is essentially a rain-less thunderstorm sitting atop a giant fire.
To quote the great Han Solo: "everything's under control...Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine."
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