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Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

sfchronicle.com

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#12
post #4

The photos in the article are not enhanced for dramatic effect. This is really how it looks like in person. Hopefully this will finally hit some people hard and we'll reverse the decades of urban sprawl and environmental mismanagement. In all likelihood, it will be forgotten as soon as the blue sky returns.

>environmental mismanagement As I understand it, half of California is federal land, so it will take two to tango.

Yes, but the limits on controlled burns is entirely NIMBY.

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#13
Saw something similar to this in the Inland Empire during the camp fires up at Big Bear. I remember attending a Civil War reenactment at the time and it was raining ash and the smoke was so thick you couldn't see the sun. It was so surreal.

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#15
post #4

The photos in the article are not enhanced for dramatic effect. This is really how it looks like in person. Hopefully this will finally hit some people hard and we'll reverse the decades of urban sprawl and environmental mismanagement. In all likelihood, it will be forgotten as soon as the blue sky returns.

My phone camera can't really even capture the effect. The color correction algorithm doesn't think the sky can be this color.

Even with an SLR it didn't work right on full auto. I had to manually override the white balance to get it to look right.

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#16
post #4

The photos in the article are not enhanced for dramatic effect. This is really how it looks like in person. Hopefully this will finally hit some people hard and we'll reverse the decades of urban sprawl and environmental mismanagement. In all likelihood, it will be forgotten as soon as the blue sky returns.

My phone camera can't really even capture the effect. The color correction algorithm doesn't think the sky can be this color.

Yeah, my Pixel works hard to correct my photos to look Earth like :)

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#17
post #4

The photos in the article are not enhanced for dramatic effect. This is really how it looks like in person. Hopefully this will finally hit some people hard and we'll reverse the decades of urban sprawl and environmental mismanagement. In all likelihood, it will be forgotten as soon as the blue sky returns.

My phone camera can't really even capture the effect. The color correction algorithm doesn't think the sky can be this color.

If you use a camera app like Halide, then you can manually turn off the Automatica white balance correction that assumes that this scene lighting is impossible.

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#18
Sun is blocked, and thus the temperature on Peninsula which was predicted to be in 90ies (naturally given no NW wind) yesterday and today is 65F currently at the noon. Basically a nuclear winter preview - the amount of wood burned in the last month near Bay Area (say 20 ton x 800K acres) is like several large nukes. Daily - 20 ton x 10K+ acres - is like a smaller one.

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#19

That's the view from my apartment's window. No edit or HDR, just Halide without white calibration. It actually looks pretty beautiful, Blade Runner style. Unfortunate that it's because of fires though... https://twitter.com/victor_kabdebon/status/13037150297792307...

I also had to use Halide to get a real pic of the skies. The iPhone was too "smart" and would get rid of the color sepia color in the sky.

Re: Foreboding Skies over the SF Bay Area

#20
It seems clear that the Western US is going to burn until the fuel is gone in enough places that megafires can't develop easily. It's like ecological herd immunity.

Most affected states are still in the reactive firefighting mode rather than thinking how to get ahead of the curve by removing a century of fuel accumulated from determined fire suppression. There's no question rising temperatures make things worse, but really the bill is just coming due sooner.

CA gov Gavin Newsome's news conference is a good sample of what's currently wrong with our approach. It's what he doesn't say that's interesting.

[1] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/09/08/...

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