Foggy Mornings

Thought I would write just a little bit about the cool foggy mornings we’ve been having along the Northern Front range this week. Dylan has a particularly awesome picture of our morning pea soup up on Flickr right now.

I’ve actually heard a lot of theories to explain this lately, but I think what happened was a mixture of local and large-scale weather. Locally, we had a pretty intense rain event, that left the ground very wet (saturated, almost).

Evaporating moisture from the surface condenses in the cool dry air that moved in behind the frontal system that brought the rain. Makes sense. Check out the temperatures (red line) and dew points (blue line) the last couple of days:

On the large-scale though, the storm system has moved off to the east, and has been sending little bits of cloudiness our way. The satellite makes this fog look like part of the cloud system just getting trapped in our little bit of local valley.

When you sit at near 1,000ft above the storm to your east, it’s easy to get outflow from big storms at ground level. And pretty cool! I’ve enjoyed watching the fog flow in and lift out so much lately, that I made a little movie from the web cam that sits on top of my building. Enjoy!