Hazy skies return thanks to upper-level smoke

 

Summer smoke makes a return to our Stateline skies Tuesday thanks to the northwest position of the jet stream and a passing cold front late Monday night/Tuesday morning. But unlike our last bout with wildfire smoke, most of this smoke will remain in the upper levels of the atmosphere. There will still be some impacts to our air quality over the next couple of days as we remain in the moderate category. For the current air quality and forecasts, you can click here.

The smoke is coming from fires over the Pacific Northwest as a ridge of high pressure sits across the southern Plains. This continues to bring high heat to the south but allows the smoke to move across some of the northwest, Plains, and across the Great Lakes. Thanks to an upper-level inversion in our atmosphere that smoke isn't able to easily mix down to the surface, although there may be some that tries late Wednesday and Thursday. This may be more of an issue to our west than for us locally.

As our winds remain positioned from the northwest in the jet stream, we will likely continue to see at least some smoke impact our skies throughout the week.

What you'll notice more of, however, will be the reddish sky during the sunrise and sunset. This has to do with the smoke particles in the atmosphere, scattering more of the blue/violent light wavelengths. Those wavelengths are shorter and tend to scatter easily, leaving behind the red and orange light wavelengths. And because the sun's light has a longer distance to travel through our atmosphere during sunrise and sunset, more of the blue/violet light gets scattered, leaving behind the red. Depending on the thickness of smoke this could leave us with a very vibrant sunrise/sunset, or more of muted one.