Distant sands, smoke create haze in Alaska's sky

[Blue_In_AK]

http://www.adn.com/news/environment/story/384167.html

LIKE SMOG: Fires in Russia, storms in Mongolia blamed.

By JAMES HALPIN
[e-mail]

The cloudy, off-white haze crept into Anchorage over the weekend, obscuring the once-crisp view of the Chugach Mountains with a smog-like quality more akin to a view of the Los Angeles skyline.

But that gunk in our air isn't from car exhausts. Instead, smoke from Russian wildfires and dust kicked up during sandstorms in Mongolia's Gobi Desert are to blame, according to state and federal atmospheric officials.

"It's one of the biggest clouds of dust I've seen on the satellite images in a while," said Gerry Guay, manager of the state's Air Monitoring and Quality Assurance Program. "It covered a fairly extensive area."

<snip>

This year, dust is only half the problem. Massive wildfires spanning a huge swath of southern Siberia in the Russian Far East broke out last week, contributing smoke to the mix and worsening an unusually dusty spring, Albanese said. One can't smell the smoke because of its lofty position in the sky, he said.

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I was up half the night coughing and my eyes burn. I can't wait for the rain.

[Warpy]

1. I got 2 hours' sleep last night

because I woke up sneezing and coughing. We need some rain here in the high desert, too.

The sunsets have been spectacular, though. I wondered what was going on. Usually cloudless sunsets aren't that wonderful.

[Blue_In_AK]

2. Our sunrise was pretty nice this morning, too,

for being cloudless. Ordinarily, I'm not up at 5:30 to see it, but I didn't want to wake my husband with my coughing, so I just got up early and made the best of it. We're supposed to have a wind shift to the southeast tonight, so hopefully this will all clear out soon. I hope you guys get some rain, too.