CONNECTICUT, USA — If you looked up in the sky on Tuesday you may have noticed a haze or film in the sky. The sun during the day not looking as bright. Well, this is tied to the wildfires out west.
Heavy smoke from those fires made its way into the upper levels of the atmosphere and have traveled through the jet stream thousands of feet up across the United States.
The smoke is not something you can smell and is not expected to impact our air quality locally, but it has played somewhat of a factor in our sunrises and sunsets. The more vivid sunrises and sunsets are due to the smoke acting as a canvas for our typical sunsets.
Executive Director of the Talcott Mountain Science Center, Jonathan Craig explained:
“The scattering of light is really caused by the atmosphere. The smoke really just gives us a white background to see it against, whereas normally we would have a clear sky it would just be that red color muted now we have a white background for it to really paint itself on”