Sunday 3 January 2010

New year's vog

Winds have been light and variable here and the vog is bad. It's made for some surreal sunsets as viewed from home. They're not stunningly beautiful or anything like that, the current El Nino conditions have meant clear skies for many days, but as the sun gets low the volcanic particles in the atmosphere dim the light so much you can look at the sun directly without being blinded.

Today, when I took these pictures, it wasn't so bad, we experienced some onshore winds that dissipated the vog to some extent, but driving into town on Saturday afternoon reminded me of an autumn drive in the UK - although it was daylight nearly everyone had their car headlights on. Opening the the side window reminded me that this wasn't the UK - the fog smelled of sulphur!

5 comments:

Zuzana said...

Beautiful pictures as always.
I wonder what a fog that smells of sulphur feel like.;)
xo
Zuzana

Anonymous said...

Aloha Tom. I caught some similarly eerie sunset filtered by vog on Maui last week. I am not sure if you saw them on my escape blog or not. I thought they were kind of cool.

Has it blown away yet? Has it rained yet?

Tom said...

Zuzana - it feels a little eerie at times - it's like thick haze in Europe but with a very unusual smell!

Blake - the vog is still here. We may get some weak trades in the next couple of days but will be back to light and variable winds with vog again this weekend. The weather is almost identical to 97/98 (including no snow at the summit of MK) except this time there's so much more vog due to the activity on Kilauea.

Tom

Devany said...

So, did you get your new camera? Mine is being shipped right now.

Great (and very realistic) pictures of the vog! It is not quite so bad the last two days here, especially looking to the pacific and we have had wind all day, which is also nice. But where did our rain go? This has been the driest month since we moved here. I have to water every day... maybe my water bill will "spike" to $20!

Tom said...

I have a new Panasonic FZ35. It's the upgraded version of my old camera. I haven't used it much so don't really have much to report so far.

The last strong El Nino event was in 97/98 and we had a severe drought - I had no rain at all for three months. The conditions right now are very similar and I wouldn't be surprised if we have little or no rainfall for the next couple of months. I hope I'm wrong. The only good thing about that is I don't have to get the weedwhacker out so often!

Tom