They don't look any realer when you're standing right in them. I fell asleep at about 4AM last night and woke up at about 9. It took a few minutes to figure out whether it was daytime; the light coming through the windowshaded east-facing in my bedroom weren't any brighter than they'd been when I went to sleep.
KQED-FM, the big local NPR affiliate in San Francisco, has been saying all day that the orange skies on the bayfront are not from the southern lightning complex fires (near Santa Cruz and just east of Silicon Valley) or the northern lightning complex fire (Napa, Sonoma and neighboring counties surrounding Lake Berryessa), the ones that have been producing the caustic air we've been breathing for the last few weeks. The smoke causing the filtered orange light is much higher in the atmosphere, from the fire in Southern Oregon; it's high up enough that the particles are filtering out blue light, and creating the orange hue. Which is *totally real*, and makes you think somebody transported you to Mars while you slept. Fortunately, the smoke making the sky orange don't appear to be adding to the breathable particulates at street level; the air today isn't any nastier to breathe than yesterday's not-orange air was. Unless you're right near the fires, the heat is caused by convection currents generated by the fires; they get the smoke up into the atmosphere at a level that traps the radiated heat in, and the temps go up everywhere. The Bay Area is like a set of bowls, with hills all around one; whatever gets inside one bowl gets everywhere inside the bowl. Everyone along the bayshore is subjected to the same conditions, unless a strong ocean wind blows the gunk off the areas surrounding the mouth of the Bay: north side of San Francisco, Sausalito (Marin County), West Berkeley/Albany (East Bay). I was out in Walnut Creek at a doctor's office yesterday, on Ygnacio Valley Road, the big high-speed drag immediately south of RBWHQ and the worst street I know of for bike riding, bad enough that I ride on the sidewalk (as signage permits you to do, recognizing that street traffic runs at 60MPH and nobody in WC walks anyway). It was over 100 and the air was like breathing a scouring pad, but the sky was smog grey - not orange, which is today's new development. It's a lot cooler today, but the troubles will persist until the rain starts, or until we get several days of big winds through the Golden Gate. Don't really feel like riding today. Peter 'enough, already" Adler West Berkeley, CA On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 2:41:19 PM UTC-7, Bicycle Belle Ding Ding! wrote: > > Those photos of Berkeley don’t even look real. > > What is it like to go outside? Can you feel the heat from the fires? Is it > hard to breathe or can’t you discern a difference? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/e84702a3-ff7b-419d-ac22-e8427fae36cdo%40googlegroups.com.
