As I walked out the door this morning, I turned to my wife and said, “I know we used to have neighbors. There was a house right across the street… now it’s gone!”
Keep in mind, I work late at night, so walking my wife to her car at 7am is the middle of the night for me. I’m not sure if my eyes are just glazed over, or if the neighborhood has disappeared into a sea of gray muck.
“Oh great,” says Mrs. WeathermanTim. “It’ll take me forever to get to work this morning.”
Ah yes, fog.
What Is Fog?
On this particular day, visibility is down to about 1/4 of my arm’s length.
Of course, being WeathermanTim, my wife (and everyone else) thinks I should be able to snap my fingers and make it go away. “Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be like this? … Make it go away!” she cries.
In my groggy state, I try my best to explain that the temperature has dropped to the Dew Point. The Dew Point is the temperature at which the atmosphere simply can’t keep the water vapor invisible anymore. The air has become saturated. So, all this gray stuff (called “water”) appears magically outside our house.
We know it as fog, but it’s really just a big cloud sitting on the ground. The only way we’ll be able to break the fog is to warm the temperature back up above the Dew Point.
“Well, if I remember correctly, we did forecast that the sun would rise today,” I told her.
Of course, when the sun rises it heats the earth, the earth then heats the air and before you know it, the temperature rises above the Dew Point and the fog fades away, my neighbors all re-appear, and I can go back to bed and pretend it was just a bad dream.
I’m a TV weatherman in south Texas. I get blamed for the bad weather, but I also get credit for the beautiful days. I absolutely love my job!
