Apr 10, 2025 · However, the ice fog particles perhaps combine, as do liquid water droplets, with other pollutants to create obnoxious or dangerous acid compounds. The air in a place such as Fairbanks can be so stagnant and the inversions so severe (inversions of at least some degree occur here approximately 240 days each year) that the city's pollution ...

Feb 13, 2024 · Ice fog is a surface cloud composed of water we emit into the air all the time; it only becomes visible when the cold hammer comes down hard and hangs around for a bit. Last week, when Fairbanks temperatures dipped in places to minus 50 F, there was enough ice fog for Rick Thoman to draw a little blip on a bar graph.

Jan 23, 2025 · “Ice fog is produced when water vapor coming from automobile exhaust, buildings, furnaces and open water from heating plants meets an air mass too cold to dissolve it and cold enough to crystallize it.” Looking back at climate records, January 1971 weather was worthy of news coverage. The average temperature in Fairbanks that month was ...

Apr 3, 2025 · Within the ice fog, the temperature is colder and more nearly constant. The result is a thicker layer of cold air near the ground. Because of the increasing density of the ice fog layer over the past few years, those area residents who built or bought homes on the lower hills are losing the temperature advantage they once had.

Jan 8, 1997 · Ice fog also falls out like rain, a phenomenon Benson took advantage of when he recently went out to gather some. To catch ice fog, Benson repeated a cold-snap ritual he has performed with other GI scientists since 1961. He placed several sheets of polyethylene-covered plywood at sites around Fairbanks. Ice fog precipitate, visible as a gray ...

The ice fog layer traps pollutants at ground level. UAF photo by Leif Van Cise. University of Washington graduate student Allison Moon calibrates the flow rate and air volume for the high-volume air sampler to calculate the average ambient sulfate concentrations during the 2022 Fairbanks air quality research campaign.

Apr 2, 2021 · Research underway at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute and two other universities into Fairbanks wintertime air pollution aims to reveal what’s causing the previously unknown presence of a chemical compound known as …

Jun 27, 2022 · Ice fog settles over Fairbanks in this 2006 photograph made from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. UAF photo by Debbie Dean Study shows chemical’s extent in Fairbanks winter air

Ice fog over Fairbanks as seen from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Debby Dean photo.

Jan 19, 2017 · But that was back in 1970, when you oozed into dark valleys and owned the city streets. After last winter, and all that talk about tipping points and vanished sea ice and absurdly high global temperatures, I really wondered if I'd see you again. But here you are, back in Fairbanks, far from the dulling effects of the (relatively) warm ocean.