I am hoping to get up nice and early and get down to Corfe Castle to get some shots from up on West Hill of the fog around Corfe Castle. Does anyone know where I can look at weather forecasts thats show if fog/mist is predicted. I have looked on the bbc site and done a few goolies but no such luck. I will venture down there regardless as i will go down to Lulworth Cove if there is no fog/mist about. It would be good if i could find some answers prior to leaving though.
many thanks
Stew
Dang, should've seen this thread sooner than I would've helped you out on that one.
Just Earth Googled the place, and it appears to be in a place called Wareham in Southern England.
The trouble with mist and fog is they are usually very localised affairs. That shallow-layer type mystical mist you get to see in nature programmes (which I assume you are after) is often associated with a cold damp settled night after a warm dry day and condensation takes place as the air cools off but not turned into actual liquid state (rain). The best time of the year to see those type of mist is late winter/early spring - and in mid-Autumn too. Those type of mists are always associated with frost hollows (a dip in the ground where air has a chance to cool, sink and condense and then gets trapped with nowhere to go).
They rarely form in deep winter as there's no daytime heating to warm things up, so when it goes cold at night, there's very little change in humidity and temperatures. Same goes for high summer when it does get hot during the day but there's only a very short period at nighttime for things to cool down too much.
Basically, it's a question of knowing the lay of the land and possessing a little bit of meterological know-how. Is Corfe Castle in a valley rather than on a hill?
To simplify things, low-lying fog occurs when there's a wide temperature and humidity variation between daytime and night time. Naturally they show up during long periods of settled high-pressure type weather in Autmun and Spring and you get these lovely straitrated layers as warm dry air sits on top of pools of cold moist air that are not moving around very much (think of that icy cold "steam" that "pours" out of an open freezer).
The other two types of fog common in the UK is of the advection type, which occurs once a warm front had passed over a particular area and the warm humid sector has the effect of creating a fog bank that rolls in from the sea.
Then there is the "hill fog" type, it's just simply low stratus where it's cloud base become low enough to cover high ground. Again that occurs in a "warm sector" once a warm front had passed over. Both phenomenon can take place at any time of the year.
