What's With The Dirty Rain In the Pacific Northwest?

Dirty rainwater in a rain gauge in eastern Washington
State today. Officials are trying to determine it its volcanic ash
or dirt from dusty fields in the water.  

That it's been raining for the past few days in the Pacific Northwest of the United States is hardly news.

It seemingly always rains this time of year up in that neck of the woods. It's the winter rainy season there, and boy does it rain.

The news today is that in northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, some of the rain is not that clear refreshing water you get with a Pacific rainstorm.

Instead, the water coming out of the sky has been kind of dirty, milky, grungy, says KOMO-TV.

Nobody is quite sure what made the rain so dirty.

It could be ash that got sucked up into the clouds from Volcano Shiveluch in Russia. Ingredients for the storm passed over the volcano, so that can make sense. A little bit of ash from that volcano found its way to the Pacific Northwest even before the latest series of storms arrived.

Stuff in the air can go long distances. My dad, now 94, remembers brown snow falling in Vermont in the 1930s. It turns out the snow was laced with dust picked up by strong winds on the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl era.

It's been awfully windy in Washington and Oregon, and some of the strong winds hit in relatively dry eastern parts of those states before the rain started. Dust from scrub and agricultural land in the area could have been drawn up by the winds in the area.

There were also lots of forest fires in the region last summer, so ash from the remnants of the fires might have gotten into the clouds.

The National Weather Service in Spokane, Washington said it will look into it further for more definite answers.

NWS in Spokane noted the cloudy, dirty rainwater on its Facebook page. It's inevitable anytime something odd pops up on social media, you get even more odd conspiracy theories, and this is no exception.

Many people on that NWS Facebook page are saying it's chemtrails, that widely discredited but wildly popular conspiracy theories that say those contrails the thin ribbons of white clouds coming from the tails of jets - is some crazy government plot to control our minds, poison us, control the weather, or something.

The "chemtrails" are actually contrails, hot exhaust from jets going into the cold air, It makes moisture in the air condense into streamers of ice crystals, and that's what you see.

I have to say some of the comments are pretty over the top, like this one:

"Well, whatever it is, you can bet the U.S. weather service will be complicit in hiding the truth. No such thing as meteorologists in the U.S. anymore. This is just a drop in the bucket of the results of geoengineering. Stop lying to Americans, ad realize your families are being made sick and will die because of the crap they are dumping on us. We have no media anymore, just over priced talking heads. Sad, that America has come to this."

No, it's sad that America has come to the point that any odd or unusual phenomenon makes people actually believe the government is trying to kill the populace with weird science, because, I don't know, the government thinks randomly killing the population of the U.S. is fun!

Yes, the government is capable of doing bad, ugly things, but Come On!

I'm glad somebody else responded on the NWS Facebook page: "Can't wait for the sample to come back as volcano ash and you idiots will start the 'weatherman are shills' bullshit."

Oh, yes, I can guarantee that will happen.

But in the meantime it will be interesting to see whether the volcanic ash or dust theories are correct.