We stood on the Anna Maria City Pier boardwalk, looking east but unable to see the T-end through the thick morning fog.
We couldn’t see the structure ahead but the water under the pier was clear to the sandy bottom, where dozens of starfish appeared at rest.
“The fog comes/on little cat feet,” my mom said. “Who wrote that? It’s the first poem I ever memorized.”
She couldn’t recall the author.
I couldn’t recall ever hearing the lines but having grown up in Illinois, I should have recognized them, and having lived in Chicago, I should have known the author.
Carl Sandburg, editor for the Chicago Daily News and the poet who wrote so powerfully about the city of big shoulders, also wrote “Fog”:
The fog comes
on little cat feet
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Fog came in on Anna Maria Island most mornings last week.
Silent? Yes.
And the fog moved on by late morning, pushed out by the warming sunshine.
The Tampa Bay region sees about 133 foggy days per year, more than the 121 cloudy days that’s the average.
Our fog typically is a wintertime development, with a season that runs December-February.
Fog basically is water droplets suspended in the air at the Earth’s surface but there are many types of fog, as well as degrees of fog density. The National Weather Service offers some unpoetic explanations and definitions:
- Radiation fog forms at night when heat absorbed by the Earth’s surface during the day is radiated into space. As the surface continues to cool, provided a deep enough layer of moist air is present near the ground, the humidity will reach 100% and fog forms.
Radiation fog can vary in depth from 3 feet to about 1,000 feet and usually remains stationary.
- Advection fog looks like radiation fog and also is the result of condensation. However, the condensation with advection fog is caused by the horizontal movement of warm moist air over a cold surface, such as snow or water.
Advection fog can sometimes be distinguished from radiation fog by its horizontal motion along the ground.
The fog tends to dissipate quickly once the sun comes up.
- Sea fog is advection fog caused by the transport of moist air over a colder body of water. Such fog occurs here over the Gulf of Mexico, the bays and the Manatee River and can move into land areas.
- Evaporation-mixing fog forms when water vapor is added to the air by evaporation and the moist air mixes with cooler, drier air.
Two common types of this fog are steam fog, formed when cold air mixes with the warm moist air over the water, and frontal fog, formed when warm raindrops evaporate into a cooler drier layer of air near the ground.
Now there’s at least one type of fog we shouldn’t expect to see over local waters or land at any time of year.
Ice fog, also known as frost flakes or frozen fog, contains ice crystals and is found in the polar and artic regions.
Just imagine what might be seen in such a chilly fog: polar bears, ice boulders, a driver in a red sleigh with nine reindeer.