Just when Bay Area residents thought the world outside couldn’t get even stranger, the sky early Wednesday dimly glowed a pumpkin orange color you’d expect to see on Mars.
With wildfire smoke high aloft in the atmosphere, the sky was a sickly yellow on Tuesday, but today a thicker blanket of toxic air is traveling overhead and the color turned an even stranger, richer hue.
The sun’s rays struggled to penetrate the smoke, and at 9:45 a.m., it looked as if it were dawn.
“Extremely dense & tall smoke plumes from numerous large wildfires, some of which have been generating nocturnal pyrocumulunimbus clouds (‘fire thunderstorms), are almost completely blocking out the sun across some portions of Northern California this morning,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain shared on Twitter.
