40 Fun Facts About Fog

Which New York skyscraper was hit in July 1945 by a B-25 bomber lost in thick fog?

The Empire State Building was struck between its 78th and 80th floors, yet many floors reopened for business the following Monday. The pilot had been unable to land at LaGuardia because of the weather.

Which first name do San Franciscans give their summer fog, after a giant in the film Big Fish?

Karl the Fog began in 2010 as an anonymous Twitter account for the city's fog, and the name has been widely used ever since. A companion Instagram account followed.

Which towering trees of California's northern shore drink summer fog directly through their leaves?

Coast redwoods grow tallest where fog is most frequent, and the tallest trees thin out wherever it becomes rarer. Fog that drips from their foliage also waters the forest floor around their roots.

Aviation's deadliest accident, a 1977 collision of two 747s in dense fog, happened on which island?

Tenerife was so fogbound that neither crew could see the other jet on the runway, and the controller could see neither of them. The collision killed 583 people.

The London Fog, a milky vanilla drink invented in Vancouver in the 1990s, is made with which tea?

Earl Grey gives the drink its citrusy bergamot note under the steamed milk. Mary Loria came up with it at a Vancouver cafe while she was pregnant, then kept ordering it elsewhere until it caught on.

Which Halloween director made The Fog, a 1980 film about drowned sailors haunting a coastal town?

John Carpenter also composed the film's score and co-wrote its script. The idea came to him on a trip to England, as he watched an eerie fog roll across the land near Stonehenge.

A fogbow forms like a rainbow, but fog's tiny droplets usually leave the arc looking which color?

White is what remains because droplets smaller than 0.05 mm smear the colors together through diffraction. A fogbow may still keep a faint reddish outer edge and a bluish inner one.

Victorian London's thick, greenish-yellow coal-smoke fogs were nicknamed after which hearty food?

Pea soup gave the pea-souper its name, a fog tinted by tarry soot and sulfur dioxide. The joke later ran in reverse: a thick pea and ham soup became known as a London particular.

Foghorn Leghorn, the booming Looney Tunes character with a Southern accent, is which kind of animal?

A rooster, Foghorn Leghorn was modeled on Senator Claghorn, a blustery Southern politician from a 1940s radio show. Leghorn is a real breed of chicken that takes its name from an Italian port.

Which poet wrote the short poem Fog, his American haiku, while waiting to interview a judge?

Carl Sandburg was carrying a book of Japanese haiku when he cut through a park and saw fog over the harbor. With forty minutes to kill, he wrote the poem on a scrap of newsprint.

By international definition, fog becomes mere mist once visibility improves beyond which distance?

1 kilometer, roughly 0.62 miles, is the cut-off: anything murkier counts as fog and anything clearer is only mist. Both are the same thing, tiny water droplets hanging in the air near the ground.

Which type of fog forms after sunset on clear, calm nights as the ground loses its heat to the sky?

Radiation fog is at its thickest shortly after sunrise, before the sun grows strong enough to evaporate it. It favors valleys and swampy ground, where cold air drains downhill and collects.

Fog typically forms once the air cools to within a few degrees of which other temperature?

Dew point is the temperature at which air can hold no more water vapor, so the surplus condenses into droplets. Fog appears when the air is less than about 2.5 °C (4.5 °F) above it.

Which flat, featureless cloud type is essentially fog that sits above the ground?

Stratus often starts life as morning fog that lifts off the ground, and some people simply call it high fog. Its name comes from a prefix meaning layer.

Sea smoke, a wispy fog common in polar regions, forms when very cold air drifts over what?

Warmer water gives off vapor that condenses the moment it meets the frigid air, much like steam rising from a hot bath. Sailors also know the effect as frost smoke.

Freezing fog leaves trees, fences and power lines coated in which kind of ice?

Rime forms when supercooled fog droplets freeze onto whatever they touch. Freezing rain leaves a different, glassy coating known as glaze.

Low-lying stage fog is classically made by dropping which substance into hot water?

Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, which turns straight to gas in the hot water and chills the vapor into a thick fog. A fan then steers the cloud so that it lies low to the ground.

In Hawaii, the fog-like haze known as vog, a word modeled on smog, is created mainly by what?

Volcanic gases from Kilauea, chiefly sulfur dioxide, react with sunlight, oxygen and moisture to make the haze. In 2008 the volcano was measured releasing 2,000 to 4,000 tons of the gas every day.

Which astronomy term for a glowing cloud of gas and dust is simply the Latin word for cloud or fog?

Nebula once covered any fuzzy patch in the night sky: Charles Messier's catalog of 103 nebulae included objects now known to be galaxies. He listed them because they could be mistaken for comets.

Robert Foulis reportedly thought up the foghorn when which piano sounds reached him through fog?

The lowest notes were all he could hear of his daughter's playing as he walked home one foggy night in 1853. Another engineer installed the horn from his plans, and Foulis never won a patent for it.

The Grand Banks, among Earth's foggiest places and richest fishing grounds, lie off which island?

Newfoundland's offshore banks sit where the cold Labrador Current mixes with the warm Gulf Stream, which is what breeds the fog. Overfishing there forced the cod fishery to close in 1992.

Which word do Scots use for the cold sea fog that rolls onto the east coast off the North Sea?

Haar forms mostly between April and September, when warm air passes over the cold sea and its moisture condenses. The same fog also goes by the name sea fret.

Garúa, a cold coastal fog and drizzle, keeps which South American capital gray through winter?

Lima gets less sunshine in a year than London, exceptionally little for a city in the tropics. The chill comes from the cold Humboldt Current offshore, which also keeps the coast a desert.

Mesh nets on El Tofo mountain once harvested fog for the village of Chungungo in which country?

Chile's project grew to 94 nylon mesh collectors with a pipeline down the mountain, supplying all 300 inhabitants of the village. Fog droplets catch on the netting and trickle into a trough below.

Beetles and the Welwitschia plant live on fog rolling off the Atlantic into which African desert?

Namib fog beetles angle their bodies into the dawn breeze so that droplets gather on their backs and roll down to their mouths. The coast can have more than 180 days of thick fog a year.

Tule fog, the winter fog of California's Central Valley, is named after a plant of which habitat?

Wetlands full of tule, a tall marsh sedge, gave the fog its name. By 2005 tule fog was the leading cause of weather-related accidents in California.

The Brocken specter, a giant shadow cast onto fog, is named after a peak in which German mountains?

Harz hikers on the fog-prone Brocken, the highest peak of the range, see their own shadows thrown onto the mist. The shadow only seems enormous, because the eye misjudges how far away the cloud is.

Foggy Bottom, a Washington neighborhood, has become a nickname for which arm of the US government?

The State Department moved its headquarters there in 1947. Nobody is sure how the district got its name: it may recall its swampy riverside ground, or the fog that mingled with smoke from its old factories.

Pogonip, a Western US word for freezing fog, comes from which Native American language?

Shoshone gave the word to The Old Farmer's Almanac, whose December calendar regularly tells readers to beware the pogonip. Jack London put a deadly one into his story collection Smoke Bellew.

Which Chinese megacity, the country's wartime capital in the 1940s, is nicknamed the Fog City?

Chongqing has fog on more than 100 days a year. Built on mountains where the Jialing River joins the Yangtze, the city was heavily bombed by Japan while it served as the seat of government.

London's lethal five-day fog of December 1952 led Parliament to pass which law four years later?

The Clean Air Act of 1956 answered a smog so dense that visibility fell to a foot and the murk seeped indoors. Early reports estimated up to 4,000 deaths, while later research suggests 10,000 to 12,000.

Dense fog in 1776 hid George Washington's army as it escaped from Brooklyn across which waterway?

The East River was crossed overnight in boats manned by John Glover's regiment of Massachusetts sailors and fishermen. The entire army reached Manhattan without the loss of a single life.

Which Italian liner sank off Nantucket after colliding with the Swedish ship Stockholm in thick fog?

Andrea Doria stayed afloat long enough for 1,660 of the 1,706 people on board to be rescued. The evacuated liner capsized and sank the morning after the 1956 collision.

Britain's wartime FIDO system cleared fog from RAF runways for returning bombers by doing what?

Burning fuel pumped through pipelines along both sides of a runway produced walls of flame. FIDO stood for Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, and it proved too thirsty for civilian airports after the war.

Which NFL team beat the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1988 playoff game known as the Fog Bowl?

The Chicago Bears won 20–12 at Soldier Field after fog rolled in during the second quarter and cut visibility to about 15 to 20 yards. Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham still passed for 407 yards.

Which Impressionist, drawn to London by its fogs, painted the Houses of Parliament over and over?

Claude Monet worked from a window and terrace at St Thomas' Hospital overlooking the Thames, always from the same viewpoint. He once said that without its fog London would not be a beautiful city.

Which Dickens novel about an endless court case opens with fog blanketing London?

Bleak House swathes London in murk around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an interminable lawsuit over conflicting wills. Fog went on to become a staple of urban Gothic books and films.

Which artist painted Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a man on a rocky peak seen from behind?

Caspar David Friedrich painted it in 1818, and it is perhaps the most famous rear-facing figure in art. The pose has a German name, Rückenfigur, and he returned to it often.

In the 1980 film The Fog, radio host Stevie Wayne broadcasts her show from which kind of building?

A lighthouse is her studio, where she ends up trapped and under siege once the fog rolls in. Adrienne Barbeau played Stevie, with location filming at Point Reyes in California.

The 1980 film The Fog cast Jamie Lee Curtis alongside which actress, her real-life mother?

Janet Leigh, the star of Psycho, acted with her daughter once more in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later in 1998. Her daughter's father was the actor Tony Curtis.