Observation of coastal fogs using a suite of ground based remote sensing instruments

Abstract:

Fog is the cloud of which the base is at the earth surface. Because of severely reduced visibility when fog is present, on-road traffics, maritime transport and aircraft operations are often hampered by fog occurrence. Therefore, accurate prediction of fog has been of high priority in traffic safety. The first step towards the accurate prediction of fog would be to detect the fog formation and monitor the evolution of fog in a continuous manner so that we can better characterize the fog formation mechanism. However, observing the evolution of fog has been difficult due to its nature of local meteorological scale and the lack of proper measurement of such scale. In situ measurements can provide us the most accurate data, but these measurements are limited to a very small spatial coverage. Satellite remote sensing can cover a wider spatial scale but detailed structure cannot be detected, In contrast, ground based remote sensing has advantages in spatial and temporal coverages. Here we present the data measured using a suite of ground based remote sensing instruments at the National Center for Intensive Observation of severe weather (NCIO), located at a southern coastal rural town of Boseong, Korea (34.76 ̊ N, 127.16 ̊ E), which include a scanning Ka-band cloud radar, wind profiler, microwave radiometer, ceilometer and lidar. Analysis of these data will be complemented by the basic meteorological (temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction) data measured at 11 different altitudes on a 300m meteorological observation tower installed at NCIO. With the sea to the south, the hilly topographical setting to the north, and the ragged coastal line in between, fog formation mechanisms in this region are expected to be very complex. Our eventual goal is to obtain an insight on the formation mechanisms of the coastal fogs in this region through the analysis of these comprehensive dataset. Some preliminary results from this effort will be presented at the conference.