Smog

I have a favorite place to stop off and shoot photos of our near by hills. I love these hills and have taken many photo of them. This top photo was taken about noon, yesterday. We have a lot of smog because of the recent fires last month. It's a fact of life in Southern California, we get smog. The reason is an inversion layer that holds the heavy air particles down close to the ground. You can see the sky is still lovely, above the smog.

When the Spaniards sailed into the Bay of Los Angeles in 1769, they called it The Bay of Smokes, because the inversion layer held the smoke from the natives' wood fires close to the ground. So you can see, smog is an ongoing struggle for us.

With rain and/or strong wind the smog can be made to disappear, and that happens a lot; usually the wind part. The photo below is from two weeks ago, when it was clear and beautiful around here.

I tried to pick two photos that would show the same geographic features.