You may have noticed an orange hue to the sunset this evening and a bit of a haze in the air.
Currently, there more than 110 wildfires burning in 10 western states and more than 280 un-contained fires in Canada.
Smoke from these wildfires is being pulled into the upper levels of the atmosphere over north Georgia by the jet stream. It is because of a change in the overall weather pattern.
Over the weekend, an upper-level low deepened over the Great Lakes region as the jet stream moved southward over north Georgia. This shifted our upper-level winds out of the northwest, and imported smoke from hundreds of miles away.
The reason it gives the sky a reddish hue is that the smoke filters out shorter wavelengths of light, leaving the longer wavelengths of orange and red to show through.
The fires are expected to burn for many weeks to come, but a change in our weather pattern at the end of the week returns rain to the forecast, which will clear our atmosphere of the smoke.
