Before and After Photos Show Cleveland 'Disappear' Into Wildfire Smoke

Images appearing online in recent days purport to show Cleveland—but you wouldn't know that from looking at them.

The Ohio city has "disappeared" from view after a plume of wildfire smoke descending from Canada carpeted swaths of the northern continental U.S, obscuring landmarks on the Lake Erie skyline.

Webcam footage by EarthCam, from "high on a cliff overlooking Lake Erie," showed the Cleveland skyline, replete with skyscrapers including the famed Key Tower, shining in the sun across the water on Monday.

But the following day, shots of the city began to grow cloudy, with the skyline slowly vanishing from view. On Wednesday, the waters of Lake Erie could barely be discerned from the smoky haze.

A series of wildfires in Quebec have sent plumes of smoke into the atmosphere, which due to weather patterns have since descended over Toronto, and states including New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Canada is currently experiencing one of the worst starts on record to its yearly wildfire season.

The latest maps as of Thursday show the most intense wildfires in Canada are focused in northeastern Quebec and northwestern Ontario, around Hudson Bay, as well as in the south of the Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces, which border Montana.

As of June 21, the last official situational report by Natural Resources Canada, in the year to date nearly 6 million hectares (about 14.7 million acres) of land have been burned by wildfires. Across the nation, as of Thursday, there were 508 active fires.

The U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) said on Wednesday that "unhealthy" smoke levels were continuing to affect a "wide swath" of the American Midwest. Air quality is expected to improve on Thursday as a weather front moves in over western Canada, damping down the fires.

"We are expecting a little bit of a smoke today; it's not quite as bad as it was yesterday," Kirk Lombardy, an NWS meteorologist in Cleveland, told Newsweek.

He added that visibility in the downtown area of the city was expected to be about four miles on Thursday. It had been reduced to around half a mile in some places the previous day.

"Cleveland has straight up just disappeared today because of the Canadian wildfire smoke," one Reddit user wrote on Wednesday, citing the EarthCam footage.

Similarly, Eric Elwell, chief meteorologist for Spectrum News 1 in Ohio, tweeted images comparing the city's skyline produced by the local channel's digital team.

"Cleveland virtually 'disappeared' from view due to today's wildfire smoke in the area," he said.

Another Twitter user posted a comparative video, showing clips taken from his balcony overlooking the city's waterfront before and after the smoke set in. "I can't even see everything like 5ft past me," they wrote in a caption. "This is crazy."

According to AirNow, the U.S. government's air quality monitoring site, as of 5 a.m. ET on Thursday, Cleveland had a particle pollutant index rating of about 160 out of 500. Anything above 200 is deemed a risk to the general population's health.

At present levels, it recommends residents avoid strenuous outdoor activities, shorten the amount of time they have to spend outside or wait for the air quality to improve before exercising in the open.

On Wednesday, meteorologists at the Weather Network said that a slow-moving, low-pressure weather system was pushing the smoke plumes southward.

It added that reports of the smoke smelling like burning plastic was due to ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun changing the volatile organic compounds given off by the wildfires into toxic pollutants.

"Right now, the flow of the wind has pretty much been out of the northwest—pretty much where the source of a lot of the fires are occurring," Lombardy said. "It looks like as we progress through the day [Thursday], we should eventually switch around to more of a southwest and south direction, and that should keep us away from all that smoke that's coming down from Canada."

Asked about the risk of vehicle collisions due to low visibility, he said that the "major impact would be more on aircraft, because it reduces their visibility during take-offs and landings."

Lombardy noted that visibility at Cleveland's airport was expected to be around two and a half miles, and that those worst affected would be pilots who could not use radar or autopilot.

"When you can't see you're neighboring aircraft very easily, it makes it more difficult for the pilots," he said.

Update 06/29/23, 11:57 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from Kirk Lombardy of the NWS.