From: cgilbert@igc.org (Claire Gilbert)
Newsgroups: sci.geo.meteorology
Subject: "Bay Fog" Blankets the Earth
Date: 21 Jul 92 03:56:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1466900269:000:3860
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cgilbert    Jul 20 20:56:00 1992


                      Material herein from
         _Blazing Tattles_, Vol. 1, Issue 12, July 1992.
                 Published by Claire W. Gilbert

                  "BAY FOG" BLANKETS THE EARTH

     Since March of 1991, I have been yapping about the white skies
and ground level haze which produces effects around streetlights
and headlamps.  I admit that the latter affects are not easily
discernable, and I don't know why some people can see them and some
people can't.  I thought the effects were from the oil well fires
in Kuwait, but they haven't gone away.  Some of them, particularly
the haze around the sun, especially when it is setting and rising,
is explained by the effects of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, but I saw
the white afternoon skies and hazy sun before Pinatubo erupted.  I
am not belittling Pinatubo effects, but I am saying that there is
something else going on as well.
     While I was busy yapping about the unusual lower level haze in
Florida, I also concluded that it was in the global air because it
was present no matter what the weather conditions, meaning that
sometimes the air at ground level originated high up in the
atmosphere and other times it was carried for thousands of miles
near ground level; sometimes it originated in the west; othertimes
in the east, the north, or the south.  Many friends tried to
convince me that what I was observing, if it existed at all, was
local phenomena, but I wouldn't listen to "reason."
     I began to travel out of Florida in early July of last year;
and lo!  I saw the haze over Lake Michigan, and I saw it from the
air everywhere.  (Chicago also had a black smokey haze over it, but
over Lake Michigan was this whitish haze that looked like a fog.) 
From the air while flying, I saw layers of white haze almost
everywhere.  Again last October I flew to Syracuse, N.Y., and
observed the same ground level haze there and at Niagara, and saw
the hazy sunrises and sunsets.  And the layers of white haze as I
flew.  Again, last December, I flew out from Florida to California,
and saw hazes everywhere.  Horizons have become fuzzy.  Look at old
pictures and see how sharp horizons are.
     Now I have completed driving 6,000 miles from Florida to New
England and across the U.S.  The most striking single new phenomena
I saw was "fog" blurring hills and mountains.  It looks like "(San
Francisco) Bay fog" but of course it isn't.  On the outskirts of
Allentown, Pa., I saw this fog.  A localite says it's there almost
all of the time now.  I spent 5 months there during the 80's and I
never saw it, though apparently a few times a year it would get
foggy or hazy like that in the past.  And the western hemisphere of
the sky was white every afternoon as the sun was descending, in
southern U.S., and from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. 
The nearest exception was Salt Lake City after a violent front had
passed through, but even still it was there, just less pronounced.
     Do I have a hunch what is causing it?  Sure I do.
     My hunch is that it is the unburned hydrocarbons evaporating
from the billions of gallons of crude sitting on the desert floor
in Kuwaiti (and Iraqi?) oil lakes.  During the Splendid Little War,
millions of gallons evaporated from the leaking wells and oil
refineries and spills in the Persian Gulf; and the amount of fuel
burned in transport was enormous, plus the burning of wells,
tankers, and bombers.  Some day I'll round up the figures and total
them all.  In addition to all of the other burdens on the
atmosphere and the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, this Splendid Little
War might have been the straw which broke the camel's back.  I
still believe international help should be directed toward stopping
the unregulated flow of oil into these dangerous lakes in Kuwait.
Newsgroups: sci.geo.meteorology