Fog Blog

What a glorious spate of weather, so beautiful that it is almost heartbreaking. After our unremarkable summer, every moment of these autumn days presents something to write home about. For these days, I believe, we have the fog to thank. October, according to meteorologist Cliff Mass, is the foggiest month in Olympia. To celebrate, I am posting this fog blog--some photos, some science, some encouragement to trying to enjoy the lack of horizontal visibility that this type of stratus clouds brings to the landscape.

Last September, as my devoted readers may recall, I went swimming in the fog early one morning when Ward Lake was all but invisible. This year, the scene was the same (above), but I decided to photograph the fog moving over the city rather than swim in what was hanging over the lake. So I went up to Overlook Park in Tumwater with my camera. A water tower (below) marks the hilltop location of the park; this is the only time I have ever seen the color of the sky match the "camouflaging" paint color of the water tower. This is the view to the south.southeast. 

And this (below) is the view to the north./northeast Just to the right of the large tree is the ghostly capitol dome. . The fog was rolling in from the northwest. The photo below was taken at 12:15 p.m

 

This one at 12: 39 p.m.

This one at 12: 48 p.m.

  

And this one at 1:03 p.m.

   Fog is precipitation, formed of tiny water droplets, that takes the form of a stratus cloud--one that is in contact with the ground and that reduces horizontal visibility to less than 1/4 mile (1 km). If you went outside early in the morning this week, when the fog was the densest, you could see the individual droplets of the fog and watch them moving and swirling and falling.

   There are many types of fog--ground fog, ice fog, frozen fog, freezing fog, fog smoke, sea fog, Arctic sea smoke, Bora fog, steam fog, valley fog, caribou fog (caused by warm exhalations of herds of caribou!), frontal fog, upslope fog, advection fog, and radiation fog. I could go on...

   But let's talk about radiation fog. This is what we are experiencing in Olympia now. This type of fog forms on clear, cool  nights (you have been seeing the stars and moon, right?) and usually after a sunny day during which the ground absorbs the solar heat. At night, that heat radiates from the ground into the air; the ground cools sharply after this loss. The warm air radiating from the ground comes in contact with the cooler ground. The water vapor in the air condenses and creates visible fog. A whole night of this and the fog builds into a thick layer that rises over the treetops. 

  Why does the fog hover over Ward Lake and other area water bodies? Two reasons. Our lakes are located on low ground and fog, which is heavier that the surrounding air, settles in low spots. And, because Ward Lake itself is radiating it's summer's worth of trapped heat into the surrounding air. I like to imagine the lake's fog as its slow release of summer into the crisp fall air. As long as there is fog on the lake, I know the water is still warmer than the air. In November, the water temperature is closer to the air temperature and the dense fogs are mostly gone.

  Here is a wonderful illustration of radiation fog by my favorite American author-illustrator-meteorologist-painter, Eric Sloane. This is from his 1952 Weather Book (a 2005 Dover reprint). He's my hero.

   And, finally, because I had heard than rain was in the forecast (putting an end to morning fog), I went out my favorite really low spot--the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. I was hoping to find myself wandering around for hours looking for my hand in front of my face, being attacked by Canada Geese I tripped over, or falling blindly off the dike and into the muck but, alas, I was too late for such Accidental Naturalist fun. I did get to enjoy the thick fog hovering over the still-warm waters of McAllister Creek (below) at low tide. The photographs show the long boardwalk (under construction) that will take visitors half mile out into the estuary. Click here for info on the refuge and for news about the new boardwalk opening.

 

"It usually takes a rainbow, a thunderstorm, or some of of atmospheric antic to make us look upward and take note," writes Eric Sloane. "But if that gives us the habit, it is worth while. And I'll wager you will see a lot up there that you never dreamed of."

Ch'i of Clouds

 I wrote last month about cloud painting and party ideas from the Mustard Seed Garden Catalogue of Painting—the 17th-Century manual of Chinese brush painting.

I was so intrigued by the lessons on painting and life, that I felt compelled to get a copy of the book myself. My local public library did not have this book in their holdings, so I requested a copy through their Interlibrary Loan Service. Less than a week later, a pristine copy of the book arrived from The Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick.

I scanned the Table of Contents for the chapter on clouds, but found no such chapter. The two-page index listed only the names of Chinese master painters and calligraphers. I looked at the photocopied pages on cloud painting that my mother-in-law had mailed me in December. And then I found these two pages in my book at the end of a section called the "Book of Rocks." I found it odd that clouds were considered rocks and even more odd that the two pages my mother-in-law sent me were the only two pages on clouds in the book.

To me, clouds and rocks were nothing alike. One is earthbound, mostly permanent, solid, hard-edged, dark, often linear, jagged, made of minerals and covered with trees; the other is skybound, transient, vaporous, soft-edged, rounded, sometimes linear or stratified, made a water or ice, and were unfettered, untouched, and unadorned by anything but sunlight. But there were the clouds, both the “small-hook” and “large-hook” style of clouds, in the middle of Rocks.

To my Western eyes, the small- and large-hook style clouds look nothing like clouds. They are composed of short wriggling lines that look like, well, worms crawling across the surface of a rippling stream. There was nothing puffy or vertical or cloudy about them. What did look like clouds, however, were the rocks. The first page of the Book of Rocks features five rocks that are the spitting image of five perfect cumulus clouds (left). Five perfect little cumulus humilis floating in space on the white page. There is nothing to ground them—no tuffs of grass, layer of duff, or suggestion of earth. All five of these rock-shaped clouds are darkly shaded on one side to give them depth and dimension. I am pretty sure they are clouds. I look to the text for an explanation.

"In estimating people…” it begins (a beginning that tells me I am not going to get an answer about my cloud-rock debate)… “their quality of spirit (ch’i) is as basic as the way they are formed; and so it is with rocks, which are the framework of the heavens and of earth and also have ch’i. That is the reason rocks are sometimes spoken of as yun ken (roots of the clouds).”

I stop there. Roots of the clouds. I love this idea! What does it even mean? I cannot even picture roots of clouds. Well, actually I can: a flat and treeless landscape scattered with evenly placed boulders as far as the eye can see, scattered cumulus clouds above, lots of very long, slimy tree roots connecting each boulder to a cloud. It is a surreal and hideous image, a literal and very Western scene. Something Frida Kahlo, Hieronymous Bosch, or Salvador Dali might have painted after seeing a kelp forest. I read on.

“Rocks with ch’i are dead rocks, just as bones with the same vivifying spirit are dry, bare bones. How could a cultivated person paint a lifeless rock?”

The “cultivated” persons I know have done some pretty offensive things in their lives, but painting lifeless rocks has not been one of them. Imagine a time when, to be considered cultivated, you had to paint rocks with ch’i. Imagine a time when you would even ask such a question—How could a cultivated person paint a lifeless rock?—and not get ushered into a psychiatrist’s office.

The next passage, written about rocks, applies equally to clouds—despite their very obvious differences.

“One should certainly never paint rocks without ch’i . To depict rocks without ch'i, it must be sought beyond the material and in the intangible. Nothing is more difficult. If the form of the rock is not clear in ones’ heart (-mind) and therefore at one’s finger tips…the picture can never be completely realized. I have, however, at long last learned that this is not so difficult to achieve.”

I make a note to use this in my next inspirational speech to my sons: It is not difficult to achieve something that can never be completely realized. Now for the E-Z method.

“There are not many secret methods in the painting of rocks. If I may sum it up in a phrase: rocks must be alive.”

My skin tingles and I remember a poem by Mary Oliver, about rocks sleeping in her hand. I have a recording of this poem on a CD in my car. I close The Mustard Seed Garden Catalogue of Painting, pack my laptop and some cloud-painting books in my briefcase, and drive downtown. Mary reads to me from the back seat:

Some Things Say the Wise Ones

Some things, say the wise ones, who know everything,

are not living. I say,

You live your life your way and leave me alone.

I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they

are afraid of being left behind; I have said Hurry, hurry!

And they have said, Thank you,we are hurrying.

About cows, and starfish, and roses there is no

argument. They die, after all.

But water is a question, so many living things in it,

bt what is it itself, living or not? Oh gleaming

generosity, how can they write you out?

As I think this I am sitting in the sand beside

the harbor. I am holding in my hand

small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.

Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.

I listen to this poem four times on my way to my writing spot overlooking the water, the gleaming generosity. I listen to this poem and wonder who Mary Oliver’s ‘wise ones’ are. Certainly not the authors of the “Book of Rocks.”

I spend the afternoon looking at the water, the rain, the ripples on the puddles, and a book by American artist and illustrator Eric Sloane (1905-1985). Sloane wrote and illustrated some thirty-eight books in his lifetime. Skies and the Artist: How to Draw Clouds and Sunsets (1950) is one his first. As a non-artist, non-meteorologist, it is one of my favorites. He begins this primer for art students with a discussion of cloud anatomy. Except for the line about ice cream, I could have been reading out of the Mustard Seed Catalogue:

“Although clouds appear motionless, they are really slow explosions. Whether single (cumulus puffs) or solid flat layers (stratoform) they puff and boil continually…..therefore don’t make cloud-masses look like melting mounds of ice cream but like living shapes in graceful action. Do think of cloud action first, then think of cloud shape and outline because shape depends on movement.”

“To put grace into a cloud you must realize that it is a living thing, either in the process of building up or of disintegration.”

Sloane, a self-taught painter and illustrator, has not only expressed the ch’i of clouds, but also something of their yin and yang.

What a day! What a good day. What an enlightening cloudy gray day. Thank you painters and poets, cultivated persons, truly wise ones, keepers of life, seekers of ch’i, stewards of grace.

And the next day, in the pouring rain, I went hiking with my husband along a tributary of the Skokomish River in Olympic National Forest. The nimbostratus clouds were thick overhead, but the forest was drenched in the bright greens of moss, fern, hemlock, and cedar. We took a sidetrail, marked "Confluence" and here is what we saw--living things:

Eric Sloane: Weatherman

I've spent the day with the books by Eric Sloane (1905-1985), American illustrator, author, painter, pilot, and weatherman. What a joy. His clean, simple, and often light-hearted illustrations of basic and complex meteorological phenomena are making my job as a cloudspotter much easier and more enjoyable.

From Day One, I've struggled with the concept of high and low pressure as it relates to the movement of air and formation of clouds. Does "low" refer to altitude or intensity? Does high refer to altitude or intensity? Low can mean "light" and high can mean "heavy." The difference between low and high might be obvious to everyone else on the planet, but I also struggle with the use of the color blue to indicate cold and red to indicate hot. Shouldn't white (like ice) mean cold and orange (like fire) mean hot?

I think one of Eric Sloane's six wives must have had a brain like mine. His illustrations, such as the one above, is more comprehensible than a thousand words on the topic in any of my weather books. I was introduced to Sloane by a student in a watercolor class at the Olympia Center. His 1950 book Skies and the Artist: How to Draw Clouds and Sunsets was republished by Dover in 2006. Artist or no, this is a great book for understanding how to see the clouds in 3-D and, according to Sloane, how to "paint the heavens and clouds intelligently." Understanding cloud anatomy, he believes, is the key to painting realistic clouds.

Sloane wrote some fifty books in his lifetime, including Look at the Sky...and Tell the Weather, Eric Sloane's Weather Book, and Eric Sloane's Weather Almanac from which this illustration was taken. When I go cloudspotting around town, I try to superimpose this image over the landscape and cloudscape so I can "see" the pressure. Of course, high- and low-pressure areas are usually too massive to see from one point on the ground, but it is possible from certain vantage points to see the high cirrus clouds of a high pressure area and the low statocumulus clouds of a low pressure area at once.

More on Eric Sloane in future writings. Meanwhile, say high to your barometer for me.