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Decreasing Fog
Tue Jul 01, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Some of the clean air laws handed down by Congress in the past few decades, do seem to be
producing results, including some we didn't expect. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton with The Weather
Notebook's weekly segment on global climate change. I had the chance to talk with Mike Witiw,
senior meteorologist for Terabeam.
BRYAN: You did a study on fog and long-term effects in cities on fog. Can you tell us a little
about that?
MIKE: In a lot of locations around the world we see that fog seems to be decreasing. We've
done our own studies of 12 U.S. cities and we found significant decreases in 7 of those,
little change in 3 and increases in just 2 over the last 50 years, although the increases were
of rather small magnitude.
BRYAN: And did you draw any conclusions as to why, in general, the fog seems to be
decreasing?
MIKE: Well, we don't really know for sure but it looks like one of the issues is the
reduction of particulate matter in the atmosphere. Another reason may be what's called the
urban heat island where the urban areas heat up more than their surroundings which would tend
to make fog less frequent in the cities.
Other researchers have reported significant decreases in their fog, especially near urban
areas, also. Certain countries we've seen actually slight increases.
BRYAN: What would you like to see as a result of this?
MIKE: Well, we haven't really quantified the pollutants at this point or the particulate
matter but we'd like to go back - and we do have some particulate matter data that goes back
quite a ways in some of the cities that we've looked at and I figure we'll incorporate
that.
Terabeam Corporation is based in Redmond, Washington. The Weather Notebook is produced with
funding from Subaru of America and The National Sci
Today's Links
Terabeam Corporation
http://www.terabeam.com/home.shtml
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