The Lost Summer of 2025

[jimh]

The Summer of 2025 seems to slipping away. Due to various complications, we did not get up to our summer cabin in Northport until mid-June. Getting the place out of its months of non-use due to a long and very snowy winter seemed to take longer than ever. I got the boat out of storage on June 16, but it just sat in on the trailer with the winter cover still on for weeks before getting any attention--there were just too many other chores ahead of it on the to-do list.

About six weeks later the boat finally got into the water on July 30, and it ran very nicely for a 90-minute first cruise along the shoreline of Northport Bay.

As it happened, we would not have normally gone boating on July 30. It was another day of very bad air quality due to smoke from Canadian wild fires. With a North wind, the air is filled with smoke coming down from Canada, and July 30 was one of the worst days. There was no sun, just a totally gray sky, and visibility was limited. But we had family visiting, and they were enthusiastic for a boat ride. Our view up here is to the East, over about 14-miles of open water of Grand Traverse Bay. Normally we can see the other shoreline very clearly, and with binoculars we can see individual buildings, trees, and features. This summer on most days the far shoreline is cloaked and invisible in the haze. On some days we cannot even see Northport Point, just a couple of miles to the Northeast.

This morning, August 2, the sun was a dim red orb that barely cast any daylight. I think that is why I was able to sleep in an hour or two longer than normal. When I got up, I could not believe what I was seeing. The eastern sky was completely enveloped in haze, and a very weak red sun was much higher in the sky than I have ever seen one. Yeah, normally at sunrise you can get a deep red sun, but not when the sun has climbed into the sky for over an hour after sunrise.

In northern Michigan we have been experiencing day after day of air quality warnings, urging us to stay indoors, close the windows, and avoid strenuous activity. We have had days like this before due to smoke and fine particulates from Canadian wildfires, but this summer it has been more frequent and more intense than anything recently experienced.

This strange weather has seemed to go unnoticed in the media, until perhaps today, when I see headlines about it affecting Chicago. I guess the smoke finally got that far down the lake that it made some news.

Right now I have the furnace running just in FAN-only mode, as suggested by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, so that the furnace filter might catch some fine particulates in the air in the house.

Now that the smoke has made it all the way to Chicago and to lower Michigan, there is no wind direction that can really clear the air for us. I am not looking forward to sitting in the cabin all day. But if nothing else, the media seems to have finally taken notice of what is happening. They are writing about Minnesota and Chicago, but norther lower Michigan has been suffering all summer.

This isn't climate change; it's gross mismanagement of forest fires in Canada.

[Jefecinco]

The smoke and visibility problems is reminiscent of my Time in London in the early fifties. On a really nice day in Hyde Park the sun could be seen as an orange orb. When we arrived in England my Father and I spent a morning walking back and forth from our flat to my school. I was required to count the steps between streets and learn the street names. It was an effort proven to be worth the effort when the visibility on some days was virtually 15 feet. Life simply went on in those conditions.

[jimh]

Fortunately, air quality in norther lower Michigan has previously been excellent. Particularly at night, the dark sky is so full of stars that you can barely find the normally very bright stars that are familiar due to a background of thousands of stars you can't normally see. The other morning I was up early to see Jupiter rise. Normally Jupiter is a hugely visible bright planet, and on that morning it was obscured in the haze, not very bright, and had a red hue.

In addition to the smoke and haze, we can also smell wood burning at times--and not from some neighbor's beach campfire.

[Jason R]

Jim, the smoke has been with us here in Rhode Island all week.
Lots of strange weather patterns are developing this year.

[jimh]

We finally got a brief relief from the air pollution being swept south from Canada and fouling our normally pristine Great Lakes air quality. On Thursday and Friday, August 7 and 8, 2025, the air quality metric dropped from red (unhealthy) to orange (unhealthy for people at risk) to yellow (moderate risk), and we were able to see the far shoreline of Grand Traverse Bay, about 14-miles away, in a misty shroud. We also got blue skies and some white cumulus clouds, instead of a gray miasma.

Having the sun shining white in a relatively unclouded sky gave us air temperatures peaking at about 83-degrees, which is more like a typical August Summer day.

This morning, Saturday, August 9, 2025, it was nice to be able to see the planets Venus and Jupiter in the pre-dawn sky and in close conjunction. If conditions remain mostly clear, we may be able to see a beautiful full moon rise tonight on a clear Eastern horizon.

Fig. 1. Air quality from various official (big dots) and volunteer (small dots) monitoring stations. Green indicates "good" on a relative sale (less than 50 and yellow indicates "moderate" or 51 to 100. Over 100 is orange "Unhealthy for sensitive groups" and red is "unhealthy" (for everyone).

airQualitySatAug9-2025.jpg (65.43 KiB) Viewed 1294 times

Source: https://fire.airnow.gov/#5.94/46.288/-85.952

Note there are some "green" regions in the upper peninsula of Michigan, which bodes well for the next few days for us.

The website Air Now Fire and Smoke Map is a good resource for near-real-time data about air quality. Their graphics also show the location of dozens and dozens of wildfires in Ontario and Manitoba, and many of them are categorized as "out of control."

As for boating, we were able to enjoy a nice cruise from Northport south to Ingalls Bay and then on to Omena, and return. We had houseguests Don and Elsa aboard, and the boat ran very well.

[jimh]

Saturday August 9, 2025 brought a huge storm coming across Lake Michigan. At 6 p.m. made shore and crossed the Leelanau peninsula, reach us. The winds got stronger and stronger, and finally large maple tree broke in half and fell with a loud crack--must have been windspeeds of more than 50-knots. Horizontal rain followed. This came after three days of very warm air (mid-80’s) and clear skies. About 2 a.m. a second front blew through.

All the wind and rain should have washed the smoke particles out of the air or at least blown them to the East.

Ironically, we had schedule and then later cancelled a big cruise this weekend to Manitoulin Island. I am very glad we were not out on the Great Lakes in our Boston Whaler when these storms passed through.

[MnLakeBum]

Here in northern Minnesota we had 14 days in July that were in the red for AQI. I’ve spent a lot of time each summer on these lakes for five decades and this is the worst summer ever for smoke, worse than 2023 when Canada had a record number of acres burned.

Our sunrise August first has been typical for more than ten days each month.

Fig. 2. A red sun rising in northern Minnesota on August 1, 2025.

IMG_3052.jpeg (167.84 KiB) Viewed 1229 times

[jimh]

I am sure the sun looked even more red than MnLakeBum's camera was able to record. The auto-exposure in my iPhone 8 camera cannot really capture the redness of the sun as it comes up over the horizon.

We are now back in the “good” air quality in our region.

Fig. 3. August 10 AQI map shows our air quality has finally returned to "good" (green index).

Aug10AQI_Map.jpg (66.69 KiB) Viewed 1213 times