heat haze

heat haze (plural heat hazes)

1. A shimmering atmospheric disturbance caused by currents of warm air between the observer and the object observed.
   • 1860, John Ruskin, chapter 1, in Modern Painters […], volume V, London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], →OCLC, part VII (Of Cloud Beauty), § 7, page 110:

     Under increase of heat, it volatilizes faster, so as to become dimly visible in large mass, as a heat-haze.

   • 1954, Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, Houghton Mifflin, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 75:

     Behind them, stretching in a long line east and west, were the Roan and Book Cliffs, cut to their base by the river's gorge, and meandering away in long wavy lines distorted by heat haze and the smoke of forest fires.

   • 1990, Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion, 1st edition, New York: Doubleday, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 165:

     Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze.