Many people probably had to drive in the freezing fog to work or school Monday morning.
It looks like it'll be sticking around the next couple of days.
Our area has been in a strong inversion layer over this time period.
The inversion, light winds, and below freezing temperatures are all ingredients for this recent fog.
For those who may not know what an inversion is, usually warmer temperatures are found closer to the surface at lower levels and gradually get cooler as we head to high levels.
With inversions, it's flipped, keeping the cold air and moisture trapped underneath the inversion later.
2 News Nevada Chief Meteorologist Chris Larson has an analogy for how it also works.
"If you think about the inversion like the flue on a fire place," Larson said. "If that flue is closed and the smoke rises into it, it's going to spill out in the room and it can't escape. If you open that damper, that smoke is going to rise up through the chimney and it's going to evacuate."
Larson says that freezing fog is fairly common to our area.
"It's the high pressure ridge that we're sitting under right now and with high pressure we get sinking or subsiding air and the air stagnates," he said.
A good indicator that fog is on the way is to look at the current temperature and the dew point temperature.
Once those meet together, fog forms.
When temperatures get colder overnight, you can see icy conditions or what some call pogonip.
"So, fog is a cloud that forms at the ground and what happens is you have all that atmospheric moisture in that cloud, and you also have those sub-freezing temperatures and that's where you get what we call freezing fog or rime ice," Larson said.
The fog typically sticks around through the late morning until the sun comes out and burns off the fog.
The National Weather Service has called a Freezing Fog Advisory over the past couple of days.
They put up an advisory when they have concerns with visibility.
"Especially in the lower valley areas like we had overnight last night," said Amanda Young, Meteorologist, National Weather Service Reno on Monday. "We saw visibilities here drop to as low as one quarter mile in some areas. Actually we saw visibilities drop to one sixteenth of a mile here at the airport."
For those folks that have early mornings or late nights the next few days and run into the fog, Young says to be careful and give plenty of space between you and other cars.
This fog and inversion will stick around until we see some wind to break things up, which are expected by the end of the week.
