Thick, soupy, impenetrable, cat-footed, glorious fog!

We've just experienced our highest liquid water content (LWC) values yet, and the fog is continuing to roll in at the station. I'm watching the signal from the particulate volume monitor (PVM) oscillate between 50-150 mg/m^3 liquid water in the air, and saw it jump to 172 mg/m^3 at one point. We have collected about 330 mL fog water so far this morning at the station (40 mL small droplets, 290 mL large droplets) --which is great! I will definitely be able to do some photooxidations with those large samples, which is my goal! It's quite blustery out there, so I'm hopeful that the bottles will stay connected to our collector. Yesterday while sampling another good fog event, the smaller bottle blew off and into the parking lot below.

The fog has also been thick in our town, Jinchon, all night. We started the CASCC2 at about 8:30 pm last night, and although the water we collected was probably less than 100 mL at 2:30 am, the fog is still going and I'm hoping for more!

There's a flag outside the research station building, and it's whipping around this morning! We can't really see the other side of the parking lot, which I think might be about 100 m away. This is some pretty dense fog! I think we've been at or above 100 mg/m^3 for a few hours now.

Here are the first two samples we collected this morning from the size fractionated collector --check out how much we collected from the larger size fraction (droplets bigger than 16 micrometers in diameter ---note that those are 50% size cuts). The smaller droplets (between 4 and 16 micrometers in diameter), on the left, measured up to a smaller volume, but there's still plenty for analysis there!

Looking outside to the parking lot today, through the front doors, you can see how much it looks like the Oregon Coast! Very wet and foggy. There's no rain, really, but everything is saturated from all the dense fog we've gotten. Dr. Lee also reminded me that if the droplets in a fog event are generally larger, their gravitational deposition velocity will be larger, so surfaces at the ground will be wetter ---which makes sense since we've gotten such a large volume of large droplets this morning.

Here's the PVM, reading at 129 mg/m^3! It's going higher than that, but it's hard to catch the numbers as they zoom by.

Hopefully this will last all day and we'll get lots of good samples! The other graduate student from Dr. Lee's lab, Sungwon, will be coming this afternoon to replace us at the island for a few days so we can get some sleep. I'll be traveling to Busan with some friends from my EAPSI program for the fourth of July weekend, doing a templestay at Golgusa Temple in Gyeongju, and staying with Kelsey in Seoul for a few nights. Off to more adventures!

P.S. --Thanks, Mom, for the lovely title for this post!

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