Are people - espectially on the US West Coast -seeing elevated levels of uncertainty in their photometry this year? Two PEP observers (Oregon and California) have been getting unusualy high errors this spring and summer. I’m wondering if something is going on in the atmosphere.
Tom
Wildfire… smoke… not good for photometry no matter where you are observing from. Probably not good for your optics either. Volcanic ash clouds too tho it has been many decades since we have had any volcanic ash layers here. Pinatubo was the strongest ever in my life at lat. 38N on the US east coast. Google AI claims one in 2019 from a Russian volcano but I don’t remember much from that one.
Wildfires: Makes me think of the olde song from long ago when skies were clearer!
Wildfire smoke is not new out here - we avoid working in bad skies. We are getting large errors (B&V) in what appear to be good skies.
Tom
I guess you’ll have to figure it out then…
Got anything else to go on other than uncertainty being larger?
How much larger are the levels of uncertainty?
Did you ask the two observers what is going on? Any changes in the hardware, reduction process?
My levels of uncertainty have gone way up… close to infinity and beyond with our fine weather on the east coast USA. 
Many PEP observations have been submitted during the past several years when smoke or cloud was in the observers’ skies. I noticed that many observations submitted were from observers who had smoke or some cloud over their regions, easily visible on satellite imagery. Decades ago, the rule was to only collect photometry during photometric conditions. The past few years, I have noticed PEP data submitted when skies were obviously not (just judging from visible satellite imagery) photometrically clear over the regions of observers submitting data. One guess that I had was that people are either less aware of high cloudiness, maybe due to light pollution and skyglow, or else they use automatic or robotic photometry rigs which have ‘cloud sensors’ but may not be able to detect when there are varying bands or strands of high thin cloud (which causes increased uncertainty in photometric observations). “We avoid working in bad skies” may not apply when the observer believes that skies are good, but skies may be unsuitable for photometry. Photometrists ought to carefully analyze weather and smoke conditions and then decide if skies are suitable for photometry, before starting the observations.