December 3, 2024
Calm, but Foggy Tuesday on Campus
Last updated 12:25 PM, Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024
By: Connor Boske, Addison Curp, Kyra Schlezinger, and Annabelle Tjio
Happy Tuesday and dead week, Huskies!
Today and for the remainder of the week, we are looking at calm and cold conditions with lots of opportunity for sunshine in the afternoons as well as fog in the mornings. Rain will not return until Friday, so although it is cold you can count on staying dry. Try to enjoy the sunshine these next few days when you can, it’s a rare phenomenon in December! Our high will be in the mid-40s, which in the sunshine should take the edge off the chilly conditions, but at night, you might even want gloves as it got into the low 30s last night and will be the same tonight! Last night was our first freeze for the season, and typically we have our first frost in early to mid-November.
Sunset times are at some of the earliest they will get! For the next couple of weeks, the sun will set closer and closer to 4:10 pm. Today, get out around 4:20 pm to try and see the sun’s final glimpse through the fog at 4:24 pm. On the 17th, the sun will set pretty early at 4:17 pm and then we’ll start to get later sunset times through the rest of daylight savings. Our first sunset after 5 pm will be in late January so keep trekking through this next month of early darkness.
Today’s high is 46 which is just around the average high of 48 for this day. The record high was 60 in 2015. The low today is 30 which is below average and closer to the record low of 27 in 1994.
If you were driving home late last night or woke up early this morning you might have caught a glimpse of the fog creeping in overnight. Above shows the satellite imagery over the state which appears to have a large unified area of cloud coverage over Eastern Washington and the local Puget Sound areas. These grey clouds signify low clouds or in our case, overnight fog that remained until the early morning. Though it turned out to be less dense, visibility was limited. Colder temperatures such as lows of 30 degrees that we witnessed last night, could potentially result in freezing fog in certain areas below the Puget Sound.
Part of why we get fog on clear nights this time of year is due to a surface temperature inversion. An inversion occurs when temperatures increase with height instead of decreasing like usual. Air cannot rise when it is cooler than its surroundings, trapping all the air below an inversion. On cool, dry, nights, the ground often cools off faster than the air above it, creating an inversion. Here is a sounding (plot of temperature at different heights) taken in Spokane at 4 AM this morning, where the red line is air temperature. The sounding has a temperature at the surface of 28 degrees, while at about 1.5 kilometers above the surface, the temperature has increased to about 40 degrees!
Make sure to stay warm during dead week, especially with those colder temperatures and spooky fog settling in!
Reach forecasters Connor Boske, Addison Curp, Kyra Schlezinger, and Annabelle Tjio at uwdawgcast@uw.edu, on X/Twitter @TheUWDawgcast, or on Instagram @uwdawgcast.
