“Good Morning, Hell”—Californians Awake to Apocalyptic Skies as Wildfires Rage

Orange-hued skies are due to light filtered through smoke from the state’s worst fire season on record

Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California.David McIntyre/Zuma

This piece was originally published in The Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.

People in the San Francisco Bay Area and across California awoke on Wednesday morning to an eerie scene of darkened, orange-hued skies and ash raining down as historic wildfires rage across the state.

The apocalyptic skies are due to light being filtered through smoke from California’s worst fire season on record, according to a regional air pollution control organization the Bay Area Air District.

“These smoke particles scatter blue light and only allow yellow-orange-red light to reach the surface, causing skies to look orange,” the Bay Area Air District said on Twitter.

Residents of the Bay Area reported oversleeping because the sky was so dark. Local police forces recommended drivers keep headlights on all day and bridges and street lights remained alight as the sun failed to appear this morning.

Surreal images of blood orange skyline flooded social media on Wednesday.

The skies appeared orange not only in San Francisco but as far north in the state as Eureka. Skies were also reddened across the area near the city of Chico, where the Camp fire tore through in 2018, decimating the town of Paradise. Part of Paradise was under an evacuation warning Wednesday as the fast-moving Bear fire burned through foothill communities and near the city of Oroville.

The science behind the hue has to do with the way smoke affects what kind of light can get through. The sky is usually blue because white light from the sun, which is a composite of all visible colors of light, is filtered through gases and particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. Blue light is scattered more strongly than other frequencies, making the sky appear blue.

But when smoke particles and other pollution enter the atmosphere, much of the blue light is absorbed before it can reach our eyes, allowing only yellow, red and orange light to reach the surface. Smoky air also means much of the sun’s light is blocked or absorbed before reaching the surfacing, making it unusually dark during the daytime.

The National Weather Service said conditions could worsen throughout the day.

“As the winds weaken aloft, gravity will take over as the primary vertical transport of the smoke,” it said. “Suspended smoke will descend closer to the surface and could lead to darker skies and worsening air quality today.”

Despite the scary-looking skies, the actual quality of the air close to the ground was surprisingly good on Wednesday. That’s because high winds are keeping the smoke at a high altitude of around 2,000 to 4,000ft above ground, according to the National Weather Service, preventing it from settling at the surface. San Francisco is additionally protected by its famous fog, which is creating a layer of protection between the ground and the smoke.

Ralph Borrmann, a spokesman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, said conditions were expected to remain until Friday.

Air quality warnings were issued throughout the Pacific Northwest, where more than 85 significant fires are currently raging, and people in communities from southern Oregon to north of Seattle have seen blood red skies and choking smoke.

“It was scary. Especially as red as the sky was,” said Patricia Fouts, who evacuated from a senior living center due to a massive fire east of Salem, Oregon.

Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Bay Area, said winds coming from the Pacific Ocean will likely continue to push the smoke across the west, worsening air quality.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate