Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the winter months, thick fog forms over the plains that stretch south of the Himalayas, through Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Visibility can be so limited that it’s impossible to see more than 10 or 20 feet ahead, which means planes stay on the ground and even rail travel slows to a crawl.
Ritesh Gautam, a climate scientist who works for the Environmental Defense Fund, first started studying the formation of fog in order to understand the ways in which air pollution was making it worse. But during his research, he noticed another strange phenomenon: Holes, dramatic enough that they show up in satellite imagery, would form in the thick fog directly over cities.
The cause of these fog holes was a mystery, but Gautam and other scientists suspected that they could be caused by the heat trapped in urban landscapes, which makes city temperatures hotter than those in the surrounding area. In a new paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Gautam and a team of colleagues outline the relationship between cities and these mysterious fog holes. By looking at 17 years of satellite data, capturing fog holes in California, Europe, South Asia, and China, they found a clear connection between the size of cities and the size of these gaps in the fog.
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