Re: Back here, at 40°C
- Subject: Re: Back here, at 40°C
- From: T* &* M* R*
- Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 13:50:36 +1200
Barry Garcia wrote:
> I wonder if a similar situation near Monterey is why we end up with fog a
> lot as well. The Salinas Valley is about 100 miles long, very broad
> (probably 5 miles or so wide for most of its length, but is at the mouth
> about 20 miles wide), opens directly to the sea (the mouth is between the
> Santa Lucia and Gabilan Ranges), and gets quite hot around San Ardo (the
> south end of the valley). This valley is where probably most of the salad
> greens are grown in the US (IIRC, i forget, but it's a pretty lucrative
> agricultural area....the southern end hosts vineyards).
Rather late comment on this........
We live in a valley that stretches up some 11 miles from the sea to this
suburb and ends in a fairly spacious basin among hills (big enough for a
suburb of around 17K people).
At the south (seawards) end of the basin, the valley is quite narrow and
there is a natural "sill" barely 20 feet high - the stream that drains
the basin flows out through a man-made "ravine" on its way to join the
main river that flows our from a side-valley.
In winter, we often get "radiation fog" due to condensation of moisture
in the air trapped in the basin as the air cools overnight. The
interesting thing about this is that the fog stops at the "sill", as to
the south of the sill there is free gravity drainage all the way down
the valley to the sea.
We happen to live in the side valley where the main (Wainuiomata) river
flows out into the main valley. This is below the sill, and we almost
never get this overnight fog. In our early days here it used to surprise
us if we went out at night to find that we ran into thick fog as we
crested the slight sill going into the main basin - and later, on our
way home, we would creep along through the fog until we crested the main
ridge and suddenly popped out into clear starlit night!
Tony
--
Tony & Moira Ryan <theryans@xtra.co.nz>
Wainuiomata, New Zealand, SW Pacific. 12 hours ahead of Greenwich Time
