A Foggy Mess

Fog.  The bane of every meteorologists existence.  We hate it as much as you do.

What a complicated mess we have over northern Utah right now.  Check out the satellite loop below.  We have a patchy mid-level clouds moving through the area, as well as areas of fog, including around the Great Salt Lake and in the Uinta Basin.

Those with a careful eye might actually see the shadow from the mid-level cloud moving across the low-level fog over the southeast corner of the Great Salt Lake and Tooele Valley.  Cool stuff.

Web cams are incredibly valuable in a situation like this.  You can't see fog in satellite images when mid-level clouds are present, so having ground truth from a live camera is really helpful.  Here's a quick tour.  First, looking northwest from Olympus Cove, which is down in the fog and gunk as I write this.

Source: Meteorological Solutions, Inc.

The air, however, is nice and clear at Snowbird, which is sandwiched between the fog and mid-level cloud deck.

Source: Snowbird

Because of the shadow cast by the mid-level cloud deck, it's tough to see the fog (which some might call "undercast) in the latest image.  You could see it better this morning when the sun was on it.

Source: Snowbird

The fog coverage is not total along the Wasatch Front.  Weather camera images available from the National Weather Service web site show some areas that are fog free, but still somewhat gunky from haze and smog.  The winter doldrums are officially here.