Did you hear about the devastating and catastrophic Super Fog in New Orleans earlier this week?
In case you missed it, the dense fog led to a 158 car pileup and miles of Interstate 55 having to close due to the extremely limited visibility.
What is Super Fog and how does it form? Let's talk about what we need for regular advection fog. It's really very simple, we need saturated air, clear skies, and calm winds. This allows moisture to remain near the surface and create the fog.
Super Fog has one main additional ingredient...a large fire, or rather the smoke from the fire. This can be from any tree, brush, or natural fire. In the case of southern Louisiana, it was a marsh fire.
Due to the calm winds, the smoke plume remains in place without dissipating and it mixed with water vapor nearing saturation. This further pollutes the fog and leads to very very limited visibility. Now, Super Fog is fog that allows for less than 10 feet of forward visibility, but in the case in New Orleans, visibility was down to one or even less than one foot.
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