Friday, August 20, 2010

Heavy Wildfire Smoke at Red Deer

       Yesterday a tremendous amount of smoke came in on a weather system from the forest fires which have been burning in British Columbia all summer. These fires are at least 500 miles away from us and across the Rockie mountains.
   
      The smoke was quite noticeable at 7:00AM. By afternoon smoke was obvious within 100 meters. It looked like every home owner had a bon fire in the back yard. The smoke was blue and very easily to smell. Visibility was down to about 1km and the sky was completely obliterated by the smoke. Needless to say our day was extremely dull. Night came early. When we saw the sun it was an orange red. Too bad I didn't take any pictures yesterday.

     Later in the evening we had thunderstorms which continued until about 3:00AM.

     Today there was much less smoke and the day was much brighter. However we did not see any blue sky. This condition is supposed to last until the 21 st . One wonders at the huge amounts of material burned to produce such a tremendous amount of smoke.