CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- It's not your imagination: the sun and the sky look a little different today thanks to the smoke from the wildfires out west.
The smoke from the massive fires on the Pacific Coast already bathed the cities of San Francisco, California and Portland, Oregon with an otherworldly orange glow. In Chicago, the high altitude smoke is covering everything with a gray haze.
Meteorologist Brian Leatherwood with the National Weather Service office in Chicago said this is not unusual. Anything that goes high enough into the atmosphere to catch the jet stream can be carried thousands of miles. Smoke from western wildfires has made it into the Chicago area in the past. Except the smoke isn't nearly as thick, and the end result is that the sun or moon is an unusual shade of red or orange. In 1980, the ash from the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State made its way to the Midwest.
Leatherwood added the unusually large fires put out plumes of smoke that look like storms on the satellite pictures of the atmosphere.
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"These fires are certainly large, we've seen some of the imagery that makes it look like a thunderstorm as it starts throwing this smoke up there," Leatherwood said.
People have posted pictures of the hazy sky and dimmer sun to social media. You will have more chances to do so. Leatherwood said the smoke will stick around for several more days.
"The pattern that we're seeing is convecting it from California and all the fires from the Pacific Coast. It actually goes up north initially and then comes down to our area," Leatherwood said.
Since the smoke is at a higher altitude, he said, you should not be able to smell it. But he adds the question of odor is always in the nose of the beholder.