01/17/10 Freezing Fog

Winter beauty on our notorious tree-line
for spectacular photos outside Kewanee, IL

Freezing fog developed across much of eastern Iowa and west-central Illinois Saturday night reducing visibilities in many areas and creating some slippery travel on roadways. This freezing fog also created some dramatic winter scenes as well come Sunday morning. For those unfamiliar with freezing fog...it occurs when the air near the surface has dew points just below freezing. This can cause a deposit of interlocking ice crystals as the sublimation process changes vapor directly into a solid phase in these rare events. If you have fog than theirs a possibility you have supercooled water droplets (water droplets below the freezing point) and if these stick to any surfaces you can get dramatic rime formations as well. Another similar type of frost is hoar frost, but this usually occurs on cold clear nights instead (radiation frost). The last instance when freezing fog occurred in Kewanee, IL was December 2007. In that case...the sun popped out and created a few dramatic shots with the deep blue morning skies. Actually, I remember this event like it was yesterday since it was the first time I used a DSLR camera. This past Saturday we lacked the sunshine however...but still some incredible winter scenes were found again which usually accompany these freezing fog events. Anyhow, I wandered around the backyard to find a few photo opportunities to illustrate this such event below:

I swear I've taken this same photo 3 or 4 times
in different winter situations this winter
i.e (Heavy snow, icing, hoar frost, and now freezing fog)...

Barbed wire fence with the interlocking ice crystals

Evergreen tree with the above mentioned

Amazing...even in January to find a "two seasons-in-one shot

Benefit of living in a rural-area...
(fence posts and wire-fencing can create some awesome photo-ops)

I'm pretty sure the Winter Solstice has passed right?

Pretty cool stuff...(macro-lens)

Another Evergreen tree shot...

As far as the weather over the next few days across my hometown...it looks like an icing event could be in store by midweek with models showing a classic freezing rain scenario...afterwards attention will turn to the upcoming weekend as I mentioned in a previous post. A powerhouse storm should develop in the western U.S. and will track across the central U.S. It appears currently we are looking at mostly a (significant) heavy rain event in this area which could cause some flooding issues...