An unusually active wildfire season in Canada has led to a lot of hazy days in Maine, but smoky skies appear to be clearing for the moment, according to the National Weather Service.

“Currently, we don’t really have any smoke across the region,” said Jon Palmer, a meteorologist with the service’s station in Gray. “It doesn’t look like it’s in the forecast for the next 24 to 48 hours.”

Palmer said the smoke has made the skies appear unusually hazy over the past several days, most recently caused by a fire burning around Waskaganish, in northern Quebec, near the Ontario border and just south of the southernmost tip of Hudson Bay.

“The smoke from that fire, it’s coming down in a clockwise movement,” he said. 

That hasn’t been the only wildfire in the area. Todd Foisy, a meteorologist with the service’s Caribou station, said northern Maine has regularly seen “impulses” of smoke from Canadian wildfires throughout the summer

“They’ve had their worst wildfire season on record,” he said.

On occasion, Foisy said, the haze has been thick enough to prevent the sun from warming the air, actually lowering the predicted high temperature by a few degrees.

“It was almost functioning like a cloudy day, in some places,” he said. 

On Sept. 6, Foisy said, the smoke was low enough to the ground to prompt a closing of schools for the day due to air quality concerns. 

This week, Foisy said, the haze has been in the air of northern Maine for about five days, but as of Monday morning, that had all passed out to sea.

“We are very clear up here,” he said. “The skies are as clear as they’ve been for quite some time.”

Both Foisy and Palmer said the haze might return, since the fires are still burning, but at the moment shifting air patterns are keeping it away from the Pine Tree State. 

“It looks like most of its passing to our north,” Foisy said.