Anchorage Daily News

If you're wondering why the sky is hazy, it's because Russia is blowing smoke.

Hundreds of wildfires in southern and eastern Russia are raising gigantic plumes of smoke that are drifting with the jet stream across the Bering Sea and over Alaska and western Canada, according to atmospheric experts.

The result is a high-altitude haze across much of the state. The smoke particles are so fine that they stay high aloft longer, so there's no smell of smoke or imminent danger to air quality, other experts said.

But try getting a sunburn.

"It's a very, very thick haze," said Glenn Shaw, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "The sun is barely casting a shadow."

Visibility in his town, Shaw said in a phone interview, was down to 20 miles. The normally visible Alaska Range about 75 miles to the south was "obliterated, gone," he said.

About 16,000 forest fires occur in Russia each year, burning about 2.2 million acres, according to an academic paper written several years ago by Russian scientists.

Currently the fires are burning forest and grassland in six territories and regions along the country's border with China and eastward into the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported Wednesday.

In one region alone, 61 fires have burned about 250,000 acres, it said.

The smoke has engulfed parts of China's Inner Mongolia, reducing visibility in one city to little more than half a mile.

Altogether, about 645 fires are burning.

"We started noticing things about May 1," Shaw said. "I thought, 'This stuff is coming from the Gobi

Desert.' " Dust blown from the Mongolian desert does reach Alaska, perhaps as often as every other spring, he said. But about a week later, a friend sent him a Web page showing the Russian wildfires, which corrected his first impression. Russian inspectors have blamed some of the fires on arsonists and "over 35 cases in which the fire safety rules were broken," Itar-Tass said.

The taiga forest in Buryatia, East Siberia, for example, was set ablaze by cattle thieves, the agency said: "Two unemployed men had engaged in slaughtering stolen cows in the forest and burning the hides to cover their tracks."

Whatever the fires' cause, their well-traveled smoke is impressive, Shaw said.

"The whole state is covered with this big brownish cloud. I've never seen anything like this," he said. "It's three times the size of Alaska."

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite photograph shows the state as if someone had blown cigarette smoke across it.

Shaw's computer models put the cloud at about 12,000 feet, he said.

A meteorologist in Anchorage put the haze even higher, at least 25,000 feet up.

"That's why you can't smell it," said Dan Peterson of the National Weather Service.

The haze lends itself to glorious atmospherics, Peterson added. Colleagues at his office on Thursday, he said, enjoyed a discussion about the "pretty red sunrise this morning."

High pressure systems in northern and in northeastern Russia are swirling the smoke in such a way that it drifts over to Alaska from the northwest, he said. But it could begin to dissipate.

"It looks like (those systems) might push out in a couple of days with low-pressure systems moving toward us," Peterson said.

The haze has at least one good effect on Alaska, said John See of the state Division of Forestry. It blocks out enough sunlight to slightly lower the combustibility of Alaska's own dry vegetation, he said.

"We've seen this before," See said. Twenty years ago, while fighting a fire outside of Fairbanks, another fire upwind created a cloud of drift smoke that blocked out the sunlight.

"As soon as this cloud of smoke cut off the surface heating and the sunlight, our fire behavior dropped significantly," he said.

Daily News reporter Peter Porco can be reached at pporco@adn.com or 257-4582.

SATELLITE photos of the fires over eastern Russia can be found at earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/.