Climatological perspectives on fog from the Hibernia platform

Abstract

Frequent advection fog exerts a significant impact on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and poses a significant hazard to marine and aviation activities. Improved understanding of regional fog processes, climatology, and predictability could offer significant economic and safety benefits. Although this regional fog issue has been recognized for generations, efforts to fully assess the scope of the issue and reduce its impacts have been limited by a lack of long-term, reliable observations of the ocean environment. The advent of offshore oil platforms can help us address this data gap. These platforms provide stationary offshore observations, as they are required to collect visibility data in support of the marine and air traffic that service them. Currently, platform records provide cover 1998 to present. These reports form the primary source of data for our research, and have been used to establish a baseline climatology of fog within the Grand Banks, including descriptions of seasonality and diurnal variability. By treating low visibility events as a point process, the climatology of fog event characteristics including event duration, persistence of fog cover, and coincident weather conditions is further examined. These considerations help identify and classify distinct fog event types and inform preliminary analyses of synoptic climatology. Results are currently being used to guide parallel efforts to develop fog identification and prediction tools for the Grand Banks region.