MOAU 5 Ice Fog

This is what our drive in yesterday looked like. No, the picture is not out of focus or fuzzy, that is what it actually looked like out of our windshield as we drove in.

This is ice fog. This is what you get when the air temperature matches the dew point temperature and that temperature is below zero. More accurately it should be called the frost point, more on the results of that below, but the Weather Network always calls it the dew point so I will here.

I had seen this once before, in England where it results in "black ice" on the roads in areas where they don't often get snow fall or ice storms. In Cold Lake they are prepared for that for the most part and scrape and salt the roads to prevent ice build up.

This, of course lead to a scarier than normal drive in, because after the snow storm on Friday the paved road had been plowed, but the unpaved had not. Here's what driving on the snow covered unpaved 20 km section looked like. Notice the fresh coverage of snow on the evergreens. These would have been pretty to see, except for the deep snow on the road (we were following the tracks of the commissionaires trucks from their shift change) and the ice fog.

But the range had been mostly plowed and we only had to navigate about 20km under the worst conditions. The salt on the paved road helped a lot. Since it is sunny today conditions tomorrow for the start of the mission should be good.

What about other effects of the ice fog? Well, it is called hoar frost and it coats the branches of the trees with a white ice that looks very interesting to me. Below are some pictures of what hoar frost does to our previously dreary surroundings. Also it really helped with the sun (now I remember!) burned off the fog and and we got a bright (in England they would have said brilliant) day.

I think blogger compresses the pictures where you can't really see the fresh snow sparkling, but it is and it helped make yesterday a kind of a magical day. I should have made snow angels.