Looks like our neighbors up North are dealing with raging wildfires again. News reports indicate that there are 800 wildfires blazing in Western Ontario, with a percentage of them being out of control. Down here in Rhode Island, we started to see a yellow smoky haze descending on us a day or two ago. My son said that it was like waking up in a movie where the director films through a sepia lens to symbolize olden times. The smell yesterday was of something burnt, but not the strong wood fire smells that we have had on previous wildfire occasions. Our local meteorologists are saying that will change as the smoke is expected to get heavier later today. The smoke has actually lessened the heat wave we are having down here by blocking the sun and lowering temps by about 5 or 6 degrees F (2 or 3 degrees C.) How are our Canadian friends dealing with this? Where else in the U.S. are people seeing the smoke?
Was it 2025 when they had another one? It reached all the way to us in FL. Mostly, like you said, a burning smell. At first, I thought it was our local brush fires (we get them often), but it was all the way from Canada. If the wind is right, we'll start smelling burnt wood here in 3-4 days. We get these weird weather patterns almost daily now. Everything is sunny and very hot. Then, almost out of the blue, a strong wind and a storm come and drench us for half an hour to an hour and then everything is quiet again.
My home is 4,650 feet elevation and up here in the Rockie Mountains of British Columbia the air is as clear as a bell. Yesterday I took the gondola which is just a short walk from my deck up to the restaurant (7,850 feet elevation) and was up to my ankles in cool white snow. A bald eagle was circling above and screeching, I love my life.
Yes, I am thinking that the last one was last year, but it could have been 2024. It was pretty recent. Your "weird weather pattern" reminded me of a conversation I heard my father having repeatedly with a neighbor who summered up here but spent the colder half of the year in Florida (snowbird.) He always said that what he loved about Florida weather was that it would get sunny and hot during the day and then late afternoon/early evening a brief thunderstorm would come through like clockwork and cool things down for the evening. I am quoting him from the mid-1960's, so this has been going on somewhere in Florida for decades. I thought that the smoke might have missed you by being blown down towards us. But snow is not something that I want to hear about in July.
I was in a bus in Portugal and we drove through some of their wildfires. My Canadian friend who used to be a rancher said it was worse than she'd seen back home.
I hope and pray that everyone is ok. Although I live in Europe, I feel sad when people have accidents by fire or otherwise.