Smoke...no Joke!

Two Saturdays ago, on June 21, thunderstorms rolled across Northern and Central California. They came from the southwest. This is extremely rare for this time of year; June thunderstorms are very rare in any case, and if they do fire up they would normally come from the southeast in an early monsoon flow from Arizona. Why did they occur on this occasion? Who knows? In the weather business I just call such occurrences FM...which means, uh, freakin' magic. At any rate. the storms started a whopping 800 fires! There has been no significant rain since February, so Cali is bone dry. Naturally, once the fires flared up Murphy's law prevailed and the wind flow into Monterey shifted to southeasterly, which blew massive amounts of smoke into the 'hood from big fires near Big Sur and Arroyo Seco. So, in late afternoon I was able to aim my camera right at the sun and take a good picture of the smoke stifled sphere trying to cast a fitful light on the scene as ashes rained down like snow. Essentially the entire northern two thirds of California was smoked in last week. The smoke is abating slightly this week, but with the next significant rain probably four months in the future, it looks like we will have constant fires and smoke throughout the summer and early fall.