Monday evening when I left the office I noticed the slightly smoky or hazy look right away. I thought, at first, that perhaps a big truck with a load of gravel or something had just driven by and left a lot of dust in the air? Or maybe something had blown up a bunch of dirt from one of the several large construction sites near our building, you know. But as I proceeded to do my semi-random walk¹, it became apparent that there was a slight haze everywhere, include, when I could see it, on the horizon. This was a bit worrying, especially remembering last year and the long stretch of days when we were blanketed in smoke from region wildfires, turning the sun a scary red, and sending everyone with hay fever and/or asthma into a bad way.

But the closest wildfires I had heard about in the news were in California. Also, since we’ve been in a heatwave, I have been paying attention to weather reports and prevailing wind directions, if for no other reason to pick which direction to aim the fans in the windows at home. And the wind had been coming from the north or northwest very consistently for days, which is the wrong direction to bring California smoke to us.

Of course, Professor Cliff Mass’s blog had the answer (including satellite pictures): Most of the of smoke has not been local, but rather came from huge fires over Siberia!

There was a silver lining to the globe-spanning smoke: it was blocking enough sun to pull region temperatures down by 1-4º Fahrenheit. Given that Sunday was the hottest day of the entire year, even a few degrees of cooling is greatly appreciated!

Wednesday morning while I was waiting for my bus, and then later walking from the bus to the office, I kept feeling phantom raindrops. My weather apps showed 0% chance of rain, and the radar showed nothing nearby. Also, the clouds didn’t look right for rain. At one corner, while waiting for the crosswalk to change, I was looking up at the cloud cover and I figured it out.

It wasn’t clouds. It was June Gloom in August. June Gloom is often a bank of fog on the region which doesn’t look like fog on the crowd, it looks like 100% cloud cover, but the bank only extends a thousand feet or so up. The air is very moist and cool, and water droplets aren’t falling from the sky, but they do occasionally form in the air around you.

And that’s a great feeling after a heatwave, let me tell you!

For the next several days, at least, the daily high temperatures are forecast only in the 70s, which is much more pleasant than we’ve had for a while. And we’re supposed to get some rain. I don’t know if it will be enough to get the creek and river levels back up from their current very low levels. And the long term forecast has some high 80s again next week, so we aren’t completely out of the woods, yet.

But I’ll gladly take several days of normal temperatures and a little rain.

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Footnotes:

1. Since home is now too far from work to walk home, in an effort to replace that lost exercise, I set me watch to an open-ended outdoor walk, and walk around downtown, letting whichever crosswalk is showing WALK when I get to each corner², until the watch says I’ve walked a mile, than I turn and head toward the bus stop.

2. I say semi-random above because, for instance, the first three blocks are not random. I walk straight up the steepest hill three blocks until I get to the mostly-flat part of downtown. And there are two major thoroughfares after that which I treat as bounding boxes. If I hit either of those and the crosswalk is green, I don’t cross, but instead circle the block and head back.