In an unusual confluence of events, the skies over the eastern half of North America and the Caribbean are definitely looking hazier than usual and the sun has turned a strange pale orange.
The huge forest fires in Canada are part of the problem and the smoke from these has drifted into the Plain Sates and Midwest. This week the smoke clouds are moving east and will soon blanket the states from the Carolinas to Maine.
Canadian forest fires and the smoke that comes with them has become an annual occurrence but the second phenomenon in the sky this week is highly unusual. Sand that was stirred up over the Sahara Desert in Africa has created a dun-colored plume that now stretches all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean.
This sand plume was over Puerto Rico earlier this week and is heading for the Gulf of Mexico and the gulf states this weekend.
“The one out in the Atlantic now is big,” Jason Dunion, a meteorologist who monitors hurricanes and Saharan dust, said on Friday. “It’s the biggest one we’ve had so far this season.”
Dr. Dunion, who is quoted in the New York Times, said he had been in Puerto Rico amid a Saharan dust outbreak.
“There’s a lot of dry air, and you don’t feel that dry air, but the clouds feel it because as they grow and form thunderstorms, they run into that dry air and they just collapse,” he said. “They get stifled. So as this comes through to a place like Puerto Rico, you’re going to tend to have fewer thunderstorms. It’s going to probably be one of our hotter days. And very hazy. The haze is incredible.”
Once it comes ashore in North America, the sand plume will gradually dissipate and will drop Saharan sand that has traveled more than 3,000 miles onto everything beneath it.
