Sunday, January 27, 2013

Temporary Return of Inversion Smog

It appears that the inversion smog over the Great Salt Lake was dragged back into the Salt Lake Valley with the cold front this afternoon.  Check out this marvelous video of it from George Wilkerson's web cam (www.ocwx.com, video compilation by Prof. Steve Kreuger, University of Utah Atmospheric Sciences). Note the shallow nature of the cold air, the formation of low level "scud" clouds where the southwesterly prefrontal air is lifted over the frontal nose, and the smog, haze, and fog behind the front.  Don't worry, this is a short-term setback.

1 comment:

  1. Very cool video. There seemed to be two distinct frontal passages... the one around midday (seen in this clip), inversion remnants getting pushed back to the south ahead of the original cold frontal boundary. It looks like the "real" cold front arrived about 4 hours later (after 1600 MST). You can see this in PM 2.5 data also. Ogden remained in polluted air until the front arrived around 1500 MST there.

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