The snow patches are mostly bodies of water that froze over the previous several days. There was a dusting of snow the night before. It was about 40degF when I flew (no preheating required), warm enough to melt the snow on the ground, but not the snow on the ice.
The slant-range visibility was almost summer-haze sucky. Note the brown layer right at the horizon. If I had flown higher, that layer would have been below me and it would have looked nearly black on the horizon. I've seen crap like this when I lived in a state that had coal-fired power plants and large steel mills, but air this filthy is not as common where I live now.
I suspect that what is happening is that more and more people are heating with wood, wood pellets and even coal than they were before the second half of the `00s. Natural gas had a high-cost winter a few years ago and then, in the `08-`09 winter, heating oil climbed to over $4 per gallon. Wood and coal are dirty fuels and that shows up in the air quality.
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