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Shallow fog/stratus over snow cover in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and North Dakota

By Scott Bachmeier •

GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB and Day Snow-Fog RGB images, from 0001 UTC to 2100 UTC on 22 December [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

GOES-16 (GOES-East) Nighttime Microphysics RGB and Day Snow-Fog RGB images (above) displayed the nocturnal formation — followed by the daytime dissipation — of shallow fog/stratus across snow-covered (shades of red in Day Snow-Fog RGB imagery) parts of southeastern Saskatchewan, southwestern Manitoba and northern North Dakota on 22 December 2023. With surface air temperatures dropping into the teens F, several METAR sites began to report freezing fog (that occasionally restricted surface visibility to near zero). Note that the shallow fog/stratus did not extend to the height of a few of the plateaus in the region (such as Turtle Mountain along the North Dakota/Manitoba border, Moose Mountain Provincial Park in Saskatchewan and Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba).

A toggle between the GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB image at 1301 UTC and Topography (below) helped to highlight the 3 aforementioned plateau features (darker shades of tan to brown).

GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB image at 1301 UTC + Topography [click to enlarge]

The GOES-16 Cloud Thickness derived product (below) — a component of the Fog and Low Stratus suite — indicated that much of the shallow fog/stratus was generally in the 600-1200 ft thickness range.

GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB + Cloud Thickness derived product, from 0001 UTC to 1401 UTC on 22 December [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

Categories: Fog detection, GOES-16, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, Winter weather