Unfiltered Smoke

by John P. Rairdon

Fog is nothing more than a cloud that touches the ground. A lazy cloud that never moves away from home. Afraid to fly, it’s a cloud too scared to join all its companions in the sky. A cowardly cloud that preys on the fears and superstitions of the people it enshrouds. A vindictive cloud not content to simply shower rain upon the masses as so many other clouds it goes for full contact block attack. It’s a bully cloud standing in front of the television daring us to do something about it.

Or

Fog is a loving cloud embracing the land it with a damp hug. A strong cloud with no fear for man, animal or building. A confident cloud, a brave cloud, that one kid that would run up to the stranger and ask him why he’s using a cane. An innocent cloud, misunderstood by all the people it encounters. A weathered hobo cloud that would talk your ear off if you gave it chance.

To be clear (pun) fog is a cloud like all other clouds. Fog is the name given to a cloud that comes into contact with the ground, like thunder is the name of the sound lightening makes or how liars are called weathermen when put in a suit and shown on television.

There is the existence of one other ground dwelling cloud formation. Mist. Fog and mist have many, many things in common. The only difference between fog and mist is the density and its effect on our visibility. Mist is when this cloud touching earth reduces our visibility to less than 2km. Fog on the other hand fiendishly reduces visibility to less than 1 kilometre, sometimes more than half that of mist. Mist will not be mentioned beyond this point.

Cloud School

Clouds are divided into two general categories. Cumulus and stratus. Cumulus clouds are your lovely, fluffy, tall clouds. Stratus are the long flat gray, layered clouds.

Clouds are then divided into several sub-categories designating the altitude of the formation.

Fog is a member of the Low Clouds or Family C designation. Members of this category are: cumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus and stratus. These formations appear from ground level up to 2000m.

Stratus clouds are characterized as gray, dense, boring and wider than tall or flat clouds. A stratus cloud is often the result of rising fog and usually considered to be quite tame not causing rain or snow although in severe cases a stratus cloud has been known to cause drizzle.

A bulk of this document will address clouds as a broad subject however rest assured that the point of this document is to specifically investigate fog that typically enshrouds harbour cities.

Assuming that the definition of fog has been made clear, shall we move on to the origin of clouds?

Clouds begin with water. Water evaporates for whatever reason water has to evaporate. The water vapours move along in the air joyously, lightly and without a care (this is called humidity). It is this carelessness that gets the vapour into trouble. The vapour did not know that the air is not a safe place to be and was not ready for the obstacles that lie ahead. The air has a wide assortment of nasties hanging out in it. During its float about the vapour sometimes runs into one of these nasties called Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN). CCNs, sometimes ignorantly referred to as “Cloud Seeds”, are any small solid particle in the air that measures around 0.0002 milimetres. That’s about 1/100th the diametre of an ideal cloud droplet.

When water vapour bumps into one of these CCNs it inadvertently attaches itself to it. It’s just like when your mirror gets foggy after a shower. The vapour got caught on the glass but this is on a smaller yet more devastating scale. Welcome to the jungle.

The water vapour, now attached to the particle, becomes a tiny water droplet usually about 0.02mm. If conditions are right, such as humidity levels being high enough and there being an ample supply of these CCN floating about in the air it doesn’t take long for many particles to bump into enough water vapour until a whole family of droplets is fluttering about in the air. Once a gang of these droplets become visible to the human eye they become a cloud. A raindrop is formed when a cloud droplet accumulates enough water from bumping into more vapour to form a droplet of about 2mm minimum and can no longer fly.

Most of the time this interaction happens high in the atmosphere, far removed from any of our concerns about daily things.

Sometimes the water droplets turn into tiny ice crystals while floating along. It’s a trivial fact for the scope of this report however it may be interesting to note that water has a fantastic adventure through the air. It’s somewhat disturbing to consider that ice is flying above our cars as we do our daily things but has nothing to do with fog.

More about Cloud Condensation Nuclei

Here is where things really heat up. CCN are any small particles in the air for water vapour to condense onto. These particles all have different properties and come from many different sources. Dust from the earth, soot from forest fires and grass fires, soot from human industry, sulfate from volcanoes, salt from sea air, aerosols of all kinds and other items.

In the oceans Phytoplankton release dimethyl sulfides which get converted into sulphates (salt water and other chemicals in air all help in the conversion. It’s all natural). Planktons are a very large contributor of the Earth’s oxygen and a substantial producer of CCNs but will never be as glamourous as the Red Woods.

It has been recently discovered that when under stress kelp will release iodine which gets converted into a CCN into the air (again, the conversion is a mystery but I like to think it’s about the same as when a high school student goes through first year of university). “Stress” could be uncomfortable temperatures or polluted waters or something as simple as low tide. Some aspects of university life may in fact offer ways to cope with that stress.

With each CCN being unique this means that some particles may be larger than others and some may be more efficient at collecting water than others. Salt for example is hydro something, something (hygroscopic), it attracts water to it. That makes it excel at forming water droplets out of thin air. Other particles such as soot from factories and some minerals are typically too large to form cloud droplets yet they are ideal as Ice Nuclei. It’s the same thing only in colder climates.

OK. Is the interconnectedness getting to be too much? There’s more.

Global Warming

There is a theory that was written in ‘87 called the CLAW hypothesis. It suggests that as global warming occurs, more plankton will grow. The plankton will produce more dimethyl sulfides which get converted into sulfates which helps more clouds form which protects and cools the earth. The idea is a negative feedback loop. The worse something gets the more the cure works to fix it. This would be positive and possibly control global warming. Fog saves the day. Nothing has been proven.

A few years ago Mr. Lovelock, (The ‘L’ in CLAW) wrote a book called “The Revenge of Gaia” in it he has changed his mind about CLAW, he now proposes the anti-CLAW. His new suggestions are that as water temperatures rise the nutrients of the ocean go deeper into the colder water. The plankton, a near surface dweller will starve and the globe gets hotter, probably exponentially. You don’t love me like you used to do. Nothing can be proven.

More About Kelp:

Kelp grows is forests in shallow ocean waters. It prefers a temperature of less than 20C and grows very fast. Some species grow almost 0.5 metres in one day under favourable conditions. Starting in 2007 there has been concern that global warming will damage kelp forests. The world was afraid of kelp dying. Here’s a quote:

“If you search for “global warming and kelp” on the internet, you will find 65,000 websites with almost nothing but bad news for kelp forests thanks to the many horrors of global warming. The story told repeatedly is that global warming will cripple kelp because the underwater forest grows in areas of the world with cold water and cannot survive or reproduce in waters above 68°F.”
-http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/02/27/concern-for-kelp-crippled/

This quote is from a site that claims the concern is overrated and that kelp crops are in little danger. The joke is that a search from google for “global warming and kelp” brings this exact site as the top result. (as of December 2008)

OK, so according to these guys kelp is stronger than we thought and it doesn’t mind the heat, so to speak and continues to grow.

As mentioned earlier, new research suggests that when under stress kelp will emit iodine that eventually gets converted into a CCN (“C’mon just try it once. Once never hurt nobody”) increasing the likelihood of cloud formation and usually fog along coastal regions.

On one hand global warming may be heating the water and kelp may die. On the other hand that warm water is melting ancient ice raising tide levels making kelp more comfortable. Both scenarios could result in less iodine being produced. In theory. There is not enough research in the area. Or I’m not working hard enough to find it. Lower levels of CCNs on coastal regions could threaten the formation of fog in those regions. God save the fog.

Not all kelp species display this behaviour and the same species has behaved differently in different parts of the world.

The weekend warrior’s dilemma.

Nature is not the only contributor to cloud forming CCNs. Humans have a great impact on their environment, as we already should know. Power plants, pulp and paper mills, oil refineries, tire fires, afternoon rush hour, my sons 50cc Honda minibike all produce various amounts of particles that could easily convince water vapour to hang out and form cloud droplets.

One doesn’t need proof or cited sources to know that rain will more often occur on Saturday than on Monday. We often want to believe its bad luck or a curse but consider another possibility: all week humans are working and driving and cooking and burning things, producing CCNs all week that eventually accumulate so many water droplets that the clouds can’t hold them turning into rain on the weekend. When these particles aren’t raining on the weekend they are facilitating the formation of fog all week.

The Point:

Each of these causes and contributors are all related to making fog. But I’ve neglected to mention one important fact: the recipe for old-fashioned, homestyle fog is water vapour, Cloud Causing Nulcei, and temperature. There is a fair amount of meteorological science involving dewpoints and humidity etc. It’s a sliding scale.

In the best cases, when humidity is really high (100%) and the temperature is just right (within 2.5C of dewpoint) vapour turns into droplets who attach themselves to CCNs. That’s all well and good and usually results in fog forming in the mornings around watery places.

But that’s not all. Throw in some jean jacket wearing, moisture grubbing salt particles from splashing ocean waves and the angry kelp iodine deposits and it’s possible to get fog at humidities as low as 70% in the middle of the fricken afternoon. Coastal California could talk your ear off for hours about this phenomenon. So could Newfoundland.

The foggiest place on earth is the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland where the cold Labrador Current smacks into the warm Gulf Stream.

Other coastal regions of Newfoundland and California aren’t much better off with an average of 200 foggy days each year.

Now consider the fact that many large cities are built around a harbour with all sorts of fossil fuel burning machines and factories and splashing waves and farting kelp and there’s no way to escape fog.

Fog happens in many places at many different, yet common, times of the year but it cannot be denied that tossing a coin gives you better odds than hoping for San Francisco to be a clear day. Harbour cities are always being smothered by fog.

Is there anybody who gets excited about London weather?

Has anyone ever been glad to take that 6 hour drive in the summer to Halifax only to see a veritable dome of gloom covering the city as they approach?

Can people really like fog?

Doing a search on google for the phrase “fog is good for” would suggest that some people do.

“Fog is good for”…brought to you by Google!

The NFLD Memorial University actually has a webpage specifically about fog entitled “Fog is good for your complexion.” The article doesn’t go on to explain its title but it offers ways to cope with fog and possible positives.

Further searching reveals that Kim Boyd Bermingham from the San Francisco based website sfkids.org compiled a list of 13 reasons why she loves fog. Highlights include:

-fog being good for complexion expanding on Memorial University by saying that the sunshine in L.A. makes woman look leathery
-redwood trees love fog therefore so does she
-” it’s really very, very difficult to get heat stroke, heat rash, and other nasty heat-related maladies when you are shrouded in protective fog”
- and that fog horns “rock”.

The list is targeting a children audience citing fog’s resemblance to cotton candy etc. however some points are optimistic. Nobody wants to argue against the great Red Woods but a definite lack of “heat”, “heat” and more “heat” seems to imply cold weather.

Browsing further into the google results one finds that fire suppression experts have been working on and using a water-fog system that saturates the air in a building that is on fire with water vapour making it difficult for smoke to travel and continue to burn. Museums prefer the system as it does much less damage to the artwork on display; in some cases there is nearly zero smoke damage. Naturally the system needs to be installed as any other sprinkler system would be: before a fire happens. In most cases, however the water fog system is not 100% effective in extinguishing fires but it aids tremendously in slowly the fire down while firefighters do their work. Hardly a natural source of fog it still makes a good name for the cloud. Tim Horton’s used to use glass rooms to control their smoke problems. Perhaps fog “zones” could be next.

Nine Inch Nails recently released a free for download album of instrumental music that one reviewer really connected with while driving in fog. The album is called “Ghosts”. Who really cares about a Nine Inch Nails album that they had to give away because it reminded people of crappy weather? That blogger did. The real question for this point is: “Who really cares about bloggers?”

OK! Here’s a result that really brings home the bacon! There is a fog water collecting system made of a large plastic net suspended on tall telephone poles. When fog passes through it water is collected and runs down the net to a collecting trough. The water is then stored in a reservoir or barrels. This simple system of water collection means nothing to even the most affluent of hobbyists but has been a life saver and time saver for villages in Nepal. These villages live in high altitudes far from water sources. Before these nets came along people, often women, were required to walk for hours to a water source and then carry water up hill but since these devices can produce 1-2 thousand litres of water in 1 day the women have more time to do other things around the village such as nag their husbands about living so damn far from a water source.

One major problem with the system is that fog only occurs half the year. Thus, stockpiling water becomes a very real problem. Of course the nets will produce enough water during the foggy months but will there be enough barrels, bottles, tubs and pails to store it all for the summer? When the nets aren’t collecting water from fog droplets, they are hard at work collecting dust, dirt and bugs from the dry summers. This results in the first few fog harvests after summer in being very dusty, dirty and buggy. That’s a big problem because many of the net implementations are somewhat primitive which risks dirty water getting put right into last season’s clean water buckets spoiling the water reserves. It’s a relatively new system (about 10 years old) and improvements are always being considered.

The bad: More hits (no pun) from a search engine

At its worst fog is a very dangerous weather condition. Humans often underestimate fog. Or more likely overestimate their ability to see things they can’t see when moving at great velocity while inside a fog cloud.

Aircraft have a difficult time landing in fog and accidents are often caused by misjudgment. As a pilot flies over the fog, he can see the landing strip. Fog is a stratus cloud, much wider than it is tall, so the pilot is peering through the thinnest part of the cloud. Upon approach for landing his view point has changed and he’s now staring deep, diagonally into the fog. Visibility is much, much worse than the fly over lead him to believe, but it’s too late he’s committed and cocky and attempts the landing. The results can be devastating. He may even crack those wicked sunglasses his girlfriend bought him and people could die.

Fortunately air traffic controllers prohibit operations within fog and as long as everyone is following the rules nobody gets hurt. But that means that your grandmother is left sitting in that airport while your plane waits for the fog to clear. Airports are small-talk hell.

Drivers of automobiles are in a class of their own when it comes to stupid, pseudo heroism while coping with fog. Drivers are often not wise enough to slow down in accordance to their loss of visibility. Many drivers will tail-gate other vehicles who may be trying to drive defensively. It’s this loss of sensibility and common sense that can result in a phenomenon known as the “multi-car pileup”. Fog has been around many multi-car pileups. To say that fog was the ’cause’ of them all would be arrogant. Humans were the cause because they failed to heed to the dangers. See chart.

99 vehicles, 200 vehicles, 300 cars!? Accidents happen. Was this because of fog? Most of those pile-ups didn’t cause as many deaths as they did property damage and they weren’t in harbour towns. People from harbour towns know fog. They have to drive in it every day or at least 200 days a year.

Ok, take a breath. That really is bad so here’s something that is more silly:

The Bermuda Triangle. You know about it, I know about it. One man, Bruce Gernon, who claims to have been the only man to see how the triangle works thinks he really knows about it. He has a theory he calls “electronic fog”. Really simply it’s a fog that attaches to the plane you are flying and follows you the whole way. Like that dust cloud that followed Pigpen or that rain cloud that gets you in Mario Kart. This is preposterous, of course, because everyone already knows that there is no land in the sky and therefore no fog. What a wacko. (http://www.electronicfog.com/)

So that’s enough of the negative ninny results.

Here is a pretty picture taken during fog of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Study the picture for a second.

Notice how the shadow of the tower is, like, standing beside the bridge? The shadow appears to be floating there like a ghost. That is a fog shadow; a marvelous thing to encounter, a 3-d shadow cast on a curtain of fog. There are a million pictures of the GGB covered in fog.

Four more short paragraphs and you can go home.

Fog is a cloud. Clouds are water floating in air. Water hitched to a piece of dirt. That dirt comes from plants, animals, the earth and seas.

Clouds provide rain water on weekends, protect our skin from harmful sun rays, and reflects a bit of heat from the sun.

Nobody knows what effect global warming, if it exists at all, will have on clouds, fog and plankton.

Fog gives life to people and fog takes life away. I guess in the end fog doesn’t feel love nor hatred. It’s just a cloud. A cloud that will never look like a bunny and will always ruin a summer barbecue. And if you are the kind to hang your laundry out to dry, fog will make it wetter than when you started.

End.

Go home.