A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
sea fog
Sea fog forms when warm moist air moves over water cold enough to chill it below its dew point. It is advection fog, made by air moving rather than by ground cooling, which is why it can arrive at speed as a wall, persist through the middle of a sunny day, and roll many miles inland before it burns off. It is the fog of upwelling coasts and of the edges of cold currents.
Etymology
The English term is a plain compound, and the regional names for the same thing are the interesting part: It is haar on the Scottish east coast and in Northumberland, fret or seafret further south in Yorkshire, and simply the fog everywhere else.
Notes
The Grand Banks off Newfoundland are among the foggiest places on earth for this reason, with warm Gulf Stream air passing over the cold Labrador Current. San Francisco fog is the same process with an upwelling twist, and the Namib and Atacama deserts run on it, with fog off a cold current supplying almost all the water that reaches ground where it effectively never rains.