Fog Blog: Graphs, Timelapses of Five-Day Fogocalypse
UPDATE: Although State College lost the fog yesterday afternoon, other areas in Central PA remained under it, for the sixth day. Fog is again being reported this morning in many locations on the East Coast including our area.
ORIGINAL BLOG: Dec. 10th: State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ, became London, the fog capital of the world, this week. In what was probably the longest stretch of foggy weather ever recorded here (certainly in November!), we were socked in for nearly five days this week!
I created the animation above from a webcam archive of the MultiComm webcam on Pine Grove Mountain, which overlooks the city. Notice how the mountain was clear at many points, but the fog stayed in the valley almost the entire time. You can see a higher-res version on YouTube or download the original here.
There was so much fog, it was trending on Twitter!
Here's what it looked like on the high-res MODIS satellite images (loop) -- you can actually see it in the valleys, especially ours here in Central Pennsylvania!
And here's what it looked like on the AccuCam at 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. each day:
If you zoom in on that, you'll note that some of the fog is frozen -- an unintended benefit for weather photographers this week. We had several episodes of freezing fog, causing thick hoarfrost on objects (as you can see from some of my photos below).
Another heretofore-unseen meteorological phenomenon in the middle of this -- the local sewer plant added extra moisture to the fog causing it to precipitate out, leaving an extremely small patch of snow on the other side of town! What an interesting week of weather!
Don't get me wrong, we do get fog around here, but it doesn't usually last for days on end, and it's usually in August. Why so much fog for so long this time? Becky's Storm Blog has a longer explanation of why the fog formed, but I think we can blame this one squarely on El Nino, which has setup the high pressure pattern that's stuck with the East for weeks.
At the official airport observation site (known as KUNV to the National Weather Service, or KSCE to ICAO airline enthusiasts), 187 out of 213 observations (over this five-day period) reported Mist, Fog, Freezing Fog/Drizzle, or Rain. Freezing Fog/Drizzle was reported for 74 observations in this period and visibility was a mile or less in 107 of them!
Except for a six-hour period on Tuesday, Dec. 8, when the fog burned off and we had a brief respite from the dreariness, the temperature stayed below 40 degrees this week:
Those 30s were in stark contrast to 40s and 50s in the rest of the state (screenshot of this morning's temps below) -- and for the Monday-Wednesday period, we had near-normal temperatures (take that, El Nino!) while the rest of the state was 5-10 degrees above normal.
It's hardly been a local situation -- on Monday, freezing fog reports (red on the map below) were widespread across the Midwest and Northeast. Over 30 Fog Advisories were issued by local NWS offices this week.
All in all, it has me thinking about that Stephen King book / book-on-tape / movie "The Mist." Here's hoping it's on Netflix. As Elliot Abrams says, "When the fog's gone, it won't be mist."
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