Shirley of the North

Hey there!
First let me say it’s a real thrill to get comments. Yay! Gorgeous people are out there, all over the world! (and I can’t believe it was 17 celsius in Toronto in early January. Wierd.)
And, since I am curious about it, here is the skinny on ice fog. Mostly this info is from the university of Alaska in Fairbanks, cribbed from Ned Rozell although it’s an older site.
Ice fog is also called “habitation fog”. Except for the case of Whitehorse and a few other rare northern settlements that actually get a lot of saturated winter air, most ice fog is generated by man-made sources. Buildings and tailpipes exhale moist air that hits supercooled air and forms ice fog. You can actually see it, walking down two mile hill in the mornings. The exhaust froma tailpipe makes a cloud thick as cotton candy, really billowy and clearly demarcated. The trails last for I would say 30 seconds before they dissipate. They are like comic book speech bubbles made tangible.
To quote Ned, abridged, on ice fog formation: “[the] water vapor meets bitter cold air that can’t hold any more water. The water forms tiny ice particles, so small that ten of them could fit side by side on the finger-cutting edge of a piece of paper. Collectively, millions of these particles form ice fog.” On the prairies, almost all ice fog happens this way — but it blows away quickly because of air movement.
Whitehorse is a bit extraordinary because I guess there is a temperature inversion here or something, keeping a lid on the cold air, and the ice fog sits in the valley, sometimes for days. One article suggested that Porter Creek and other communities/neighbourhoods wind up with a kind of ice smog –where the particulate from wood burning stoves (and all that tailpipe exhaust) is trapped with the ice particles and the air is in fact rather toxic!
Of course it’s unfair to attribute most ice fog to cars — researcher Carl Benson calculate in the 60’s in Fairbanks that only 3% of the ice fog in the city was from gas from trucks and cars, and that in fact water used for cooling in power plants and then released back into waterways made up more than 60% of the water vapour that formed ice fog.
This researcher also calculated that the 2000 outdoor dogs of Fairbanks, panting and salivating away, collectively accounted for a half-tonne of water vapour each day, contributing to the town’s ice fog!
I decided it was useless to take an ice photo, ’cause it’s so opaque. But the ice fog has a lovely effect of coating the trees with verglas, kind of like Quebec post ice storm. So here are a few quicky photos. Unfortunately, camera batteries last about 15 seconds before the thing needs to be whipped back inside my cosy inner coat pocket. The framing on these shots is rather poor! The first might not work–there was a wierd ice effect on the camera but it may not show up on the web.