Analysis of Coastal Fog from a Ship During the C-FOG Campaign

This work presents ship-based measurements of fog off St John’s, Newfoundland, on 13 September 2018 during the Coastal Fog field campaign. The measurements included cloud-particle spectra, cloud-base height and aerosol backscatter, radiation, turbulence, visibility, and sea-surface temperature. Radiosonde soundings were made at intervals of less than 2 h. Fog occurred in two episodes during the passage of an eastward-moving synoptic low-pressure system. The boundary-layer structure during the first fog episode consisted of three layers, separated by two saturated temperature inversions, and capped by a subsidence inversion. The lowest layer was fog, and the upper layers were cloud. The second fog episode consisted of one well-mixed fog layer capped by a subsidence inversion. Low wind speeds and stable stratification maintained low surface-layer turbulence during fog. Droplet size distributions had typical bimodal distributions. The visibility correlated with the droplet number concentration and liquid water content. The air temperature was higher than the sea-surface temperature for the first 30 min of the first fog episode but was lower than the sea for the remainder of all fog. The sensible heat flux was upward, from sea to air, for the first 62% of the first fog episode and then reversed to downward, from air to sea, for the remainder of the first fog episode and the second fog episode. The counter-gradient heat fluxes observed (i.e., opposite to what is expected from the instantaneous air–sea temperature difference) appear to be related to turbulence, entrainment, and stratification in the fog layer that overwhelmed the influence of the air–sea temperature difference. While the synoptic-scale dynamics preconditioned the area for fog formation, the final step of fog appearance in this case was nuanced by stratification–turbulence interactions, local advective processes, and microphysical environment.