Assessment of the low visibility predictions at Schiphol Airport: Performance of the Terminal Aerodrome Forecast Guidance

Airport operations are highly dependent on safe weather conditions for their daily operations. Especially the visibility conditions are crucial. Low Visibility Procedures (LVP phase M, A, B and C) are defined at Schiphol Airport, resulting in capacity and runway use restrictions. These Low Visibility Pro­cedures are based on a post­processing...

Fog from the Ground Up: Investigating the Conditions Under Which Fog Forms and Evolves Within the Nocturnal Boundary Layer

Fog is of critical importance to forecast accurately, not least because of the hazard it presents to human safety. Yet, while weather forecasts have improved significantly over recent decades—and continue to improve—fog remains a particularly challenging phenomenon to predict. The research presented within this thesis takes a step back from...

Why does fog deepen?: An analytical perspective

The overall depth of a fog layer is one of the important factors in determining the hazard that a fog event presents. With discrete observations and often coarse numerical grids, however, fog depth cannot always be accurately determined. To address this, we derive a simple analytical relation that describes the change in depth of a fog...

Missed Fog?: On the Potential of Obtaining Observations at Increased Resolution During Shallow Fog Events

Conventional in situ observations of meteorological variables are restricted to a limited number of levels near the surface, with the lowest observation often made around 1-m height. This can result in missed observations of both shallow fog, and the initial growth stage of thicker fog layers. At the same time, numerical experiments have...

Detection, Imaging and Characterisation of Fog Fields by Radar

As a significant phenomenon in meteorology, fog has attracted more and more concern from the scientific community, because of its impacts on visibility in air- and road-transportation. E.g., at airports, the frequency of aircrafts taking off and landing has to be reduced during heavy fogs, because in conditions of low visibility the pilots need...