Turns out it wasn’t a fog blanketing the area…we were getting dust dropped on us from a dust storm to the north. The MODIS satellite imagery from yesterday shows the dust getting kicked up and blown to the southwest. And walking through the yard today I could see a puff of dust kick up with every step. Yes, I often ask myself why I moved here from Seattle.
I went back and scanned the METAR data for yesterday. An hour after I posted, KPSC started reporting haze (HZ), which pretty accurately describes what the skies looked like by mid-afternoon…
METAR KPSC 041653Z 01019G23KT 7SM HZ FEW100 14/01 A2977 RMK AO2 SLP081 T01390011
And later in the day there were a few METARS that coded it for what it was…
METAR KPSC 050253Z 01016KT 5SM BLDU CLR 14/M01 A2981 RMK AO2 SLP096 T01391006 53018
One clue should have been the temp-dew point spread, which never got close enough for fog formation.
The storm got awful enough that they shut down sections of I90 to the north of us. Oddly enough, from the METAR data you’d have never seen it…there wasn’t a weather station within the storm, and the AIRMETs for that morning only showed a Tango over eastern Washington.
Northwest weather guy has posted about the system that produced the high winds that stirred up the dust storm. You can also link out to an AP video of what it was like in the middle of the storm. Why am I not living anywhere else but here?