If you glanced up in the sky on Wednesday you may have noticed the odd appearance of the sun. For much of the day it appeared to be a pale, pinkish colour. CHMA called up Jim Prime, an Environment Canada meteorologist based in Fredericton to find out what was going on.
“It’s actually forest fire smoke,” says Prime, “which is just elevated in the atmosphere.” The uniform haze making the sun appear so different is “just a brief period of really concentrated smoke which is passing over us as it’s moving to the south,” he says.
Prime says the smoke is coming from fires in northern and western Canada, which is going high up in the atmosphere and being concentrated by various weather patterns.
“It can travel really great distances,” says Prime about the high level smoke. And because it’s so high, there’s not a lot of negative impact at ground level, expect a slight drop in temperature.
“We’re very lucky because it is higher up,” says Prime. “Looking at all of our air quality sensors, we’re not picking up any readings at the surface. And with this high pressure system, things are not really turbulent, so we don’t get a lot of mixing down to the surface.”
“Really the main impacts from it are that we can see interesting colours sometimes in the morning or in the evening, somewhat similar to when you get a sunset or a sunrise,” says Prime. But this time, the smoke is dense enough to be a bit on the greyish side. There’s also a drop in temperature of a few degrees.
“We were thinking temperatures were going to be a little bit warmer than yesterday because we’re starting to get on the western side of the high pressure system. But this smoke can sometimes reduce your surface temperatures by two or three degrees. So some areas are going to be a little colder than we were expecting initially, if the smoke wasn’t going to be there.”
Prime says the smoke should be cleared by Thursday, and temperatures, and the look of the sun, returned to normal.
