Maybe you’ve noticed that Seattle’s sunrises and sunsets are particularly colorful lately. If you haven’t seen them in the sky, you’ve probably seen them on your Facebook feed. (At least, my own feed seems full of “beautiful sunset” pictures every evening.)
There’s a reason for our pretty orange skies. Heard of the the wildfires burning in Siberia? Smoke from those fires is drifting over the ocean and lending hazy color to our horizon at dusk and dawn.
“I believe many of you…particularly those near the coast and northwest Washington will be able to see the smoke, particularly at sunset, where the sun should look redder than normal,” UW meteorologist Cliff Mass recently noted on his blog.
Here’s what that smoke looked like from space recently, courtesy of NASA.
As NASA recently noted:
Russian firefighters have battled uncontrolled fires for months. According to the environmental group Greenpeace, more land in Russia had burned in 2012 than in 2010, a year that intense wildfires affected western Russia. ITAR-TASS reported that more than 1,826 forest fires had burned a total of 195,800 hectares in the Far East of Russia.
It isn’t uncommon for smoke from large wildfires in Siberia to be lofted high enough into the atmosphere that winds push plumes of it across the Pacific Ocean to North America. Significant amounts of smoke arrived in British Columbia this week, according to CBC News.
Speaking of beautiful sunsets, check out this recent video from Seattleite Adam Foster.
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