San Francisco Bay Area sky turns bright orange, some areas see 'snowing' ash
Just when Bay Area residents thought the world outside couldn't get even stranger, the sky early Wednesday glowed a bright pumpkin orange you'd expect to see on Mars. Teresa Walker of Livermore woke up to yet another Bay Area day where the skies were filled with smoke and ash.
With wildfire smoke high aloft in the atmosphere, the sky was an eerie yellow color on Tuesday, but today more sooty is air traveling overhead and the color turned an even stranger, richer hue.
"I don’t remember orange skies growing up in in the Bay Area, California," shared one Twitter user. "Now we have days of not being able to walk outside."
She snapped a photo of her car in the driveway, covered in black flecks.
"Isn't it horrible?" Walker said. Her family suffered through the Camp Fire in Paradise in 2018.
Michael Thompson also captured falling ash, which looked a bit like Christmas snow, in front of a tree by his home in Discovery Bay.
Patrick Extrum's car in Pittsburg also was covered in ash, though it looked more like a scene from a winter wonderland because of all the white fluff blanketing his hood and windows.
Winds are pushing smoke from the north, where multiple wildfires are raging, to the south and into the Bay Area, said Jan Null, a meteorologist who runs a private forecasting service called Golden Gate Weather Services.
"North winds are bringing lots of smoke from Oregon," said Null.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a statewide emergency Tuesday as conflagrations grew rapidly in Marion, Lane, Jackson, Coos, Lincoln, Washington and Clackamas counties, according to Oregon Online. Fires are also pumping out smoke in Northern California: The North Complex fires east of Chico exploded in the last 24 hours and the August Complex in Mendocino County continues to burn actively.
In the deep East Bay smoke hugged the ground, and National Weather Service forecaster Roger Gass said a weather spotter reported falling ash at the Concord Airport.
"They reported a significant amount of ash," said Gas. "Almost to the point where it looked like moderate to heavy snow."But while the sooty air in the East Bay settled close to the surface, across most of the Bay Area the smoke was high in the atmosphere with the air quality ranging from good to moderate.
Gass explained because the fires are farther away from the Bay Area, the smoke is getting lofted high into the atmosphere. The mass of polluted air is currently hovering above a marine layer which pushed inland from the Pacific Ocean this morning.
"That's the reason it doesn’t smell smoky but the sky is a different color," Gass said.
Null added that the marine inversion layer acts as a barrier. "That’s why air quality isn’t too bad this morning," Null said. "The smoke is not able to mix down through the inversion. The smoke is also sort of traveling past us.
Tuesday's conditions are different from recent weeks when smoke from nearby blazes, located directly within the boundaries of the Bay Area, traveled low in the atmosphere, nearly hugging the ground. The Bay Area smelled like a campfire for weeks. The LNU Lightning Complex in the North Bay, the SCU Lightning Complex in the East Bay and the Woodward Fire in Marin County are now all nearly contained.
Roger said it's hard to pin down the air quality forecast on Wednesday, but with the northern winds expected to lighten, the air mass above could compress and more smoke may settle toward the ground. In the afternoon, a strong onshore wind is expected to pick up and this could blow the smoke east, from the coast into the East Bay and Central Valley.
