I've been an airplane buff since I was two weeks old. I never got a license, but I was at the controls a little as a kid, doing straight and level and a few banking turns - dad had to do the rudder because my feet could not reach the pedals. We went to the Sussex airshow just about every year.
I NOTICE the weather EVERY day.
I flew on passenger jets in the late 90s every day for years. I used to like United because you could hear the cockpit on channel 9 on the headphones. I would sit with that on in my headphones - ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY on a 5-HOUR flight. I like it. I like flying. I love airplanes and flying. I'm always interested when navigation, safety and weather issues come up. I am HUGE into knowing what the weather is; I don't write it down every day, but I certainly have a memory.
So far this year we have barely gotten over 70, about 3 or 4 days so far. It's been very cool, 50s/60s. I'm up all night working and go out for walks. It's only recently got up out of the 30s at night. I take note of the skies at night; clouds, stars, weather.
I learned from flying a small plane trying to hold it straight and level that haze at altitude is more challenging than a clear sky - because you can't see the horizon clearly. When you try to keep the plane level, you look at your wingtips and you see the horizon - so you can see if both of them look the same, wingtip relative to horizon. When it's hazy - you can't see that demarcation as easily, so you have to be more careful in making sure you actually are flying straight and level like you think you are.
A few years ago I began to notice high-alt haze in northern NJ skies. The past 3 years it has been, for the most part, a daily situation.
Smog does not rise to 30k feet and drift halfway around the world and still remain thick enough to create a clearly visible thin cloud cover.
Volcanic activity would only create high level haze when it happens, not on a daily basis for 3 years (and probably longer). Mt St Helens erupted in 1980. I was in HS. We did not have months of haze in New Jersey after that. Here is the ash cloud distribution from that:
Sunspot activity would not create haze for 3 years daily.
Sunspot activity would be even over the whole earth since the sun is 93 billion miles away from earth. Differences in ozone layer, etc., shift from time to time - the earth's atmosphere is gaseous and in motion - over all the earth. The only possible explanation of 3 years of haze is cloud seeding of some sort, at 30k feet, upwind of the area in question.