Why the Utica-Rome Skies Were Purple After the Charlestown Blaze

The enormous Charlestown blaze that took down the iconic former mall was quite a spectacle. And so were the skies in the Utica-Rome area following the blaze.

One of the many fallouts from the fire was the purple sky it produced. And there’s a lot of science and history to back it up. Our friend Michelle D'Avignon Klosek shot a video of the sky in Deerfield and posted it on Friday. Here's the full seven-second video of the remarkable visual event:

And here's some history of the phenonmenon. According to the Farmer's Almanac, this type of occurrence happens often. Earlier in 2020, widlfires in western Canada created similar skies and a caused a Canadian meteorologist to remark: “It looked like we were on Mars.”

Another Canadian wildfire in 1950 produced a similar event all the way in New York City. The Farmer's Almanac reported:

One woman was quoted about how her rooster was so confused it crowed at 4 p.m., thinking it was dawn. Accompanying the Times article was a photograph taken from Main Street in Buffalo, New York at 2:50 in the afternoon. The sky became so dark that streetlights were turned on.

Now for the science. Mashable says it's "a process called 'scattering' in which the color of light from the sky is affected by the wavelength of the light and the size of the particles in the air, according to Science Daily."

There's even more science on Michelle D'Avignon Klosek's Facebook page.