Whether that happens in 10 years or 100 years is uncertain, but the change is obvious. “They’re not growing as much each year, they’re thinning their canopies.”ĭawson added, “That’s kind of a telltale sign that the southern end is drying out to a point where eventually the redwoods are not going to be able to sustain themselves they’re just not going to make it.” “Growth is compromised in some of the older trees,” he said. Small redwood trees are already dying there, and larger trees are showing signs of distress. Their range will gradually shrink, he said, as areas on the edge of the misty zone, like Big Sur, become too warm and dry, and fog disappears. Credit: Bob Berwynĭawson, whose research largely focuses on coastal redwoods, said he’s already seeing the impacts of lessened fog on the ancient giants.
Fog flowing through Danube Valley in Austria. So, shorter duration per day, and also per season-the fog season is actually shorter, too.” Historically, the fog season would last from June to October, but more recently, Dawson said, it often doesn’t start until July. “Now it’s gone to about nine hours a day. “In the ‘50s, coastal California, Santa Cruz included, was getting about 12 hours of fog every fog season, per day,” Dawson said. Their analysis, the most comprehensive data on fog patterns along the Pacific coast, showed that on average, fog has decreased about 30 percent in the past 60 years.
Johnstone, a graduate student, collected airport flight-control records along the entire West Coast, from Baja to British Columbia, dating back to 1951. In a 2010 paper, Todd Dawson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and James A. Even if greenhouse gas emissions slow dramatically, the state’s most recent climate assessment projects that by 2080, Santa Cruz will have a climate like Goleta, 200 miles to the south, which is currently 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and 31 percent drier. ‘I’m Alarmed by What the Future Looks Like’Ĭalifornia has already warmed between 1 and 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. While the reasons for the decline are hard to decipher, solving the mystery is crucial to understanding the future of fog and whether it will continue to grace our coastlines, nourish crops and sustain the redwoods. Yet evidence is starting to mount supporting what has for years been anecdotally reported by shoreline residents and scientists-fog is vanishing from many shoreline zones, including the California coast and Santa Cruz region.
And water harvested from fog is becoming increasingly important for people in arid, subtropical areas that are drying out with global warming. Unusually persistent fog can blight important food crops, but it is beneficial to others, including the huge fields of artichokes and pumpkins along the Central Coast of California that thrive in just the right combination of light, temperature and moisture delivered, in large part, by coastal fog belts. “And that transformation, that transition, driven by more things than you can even count.”įog’s most noticeable human impact is on transportation, because delays to shipping, road traffic, air travel and freight cost billions of dollars per year. Geological Survey and director of the Pacific Coastal Fog Project. “It’s an incredibly sensitive point between water being vapor, and water being liquid,” said Alicia Torregrosa, a project scientist at the U.S. Fog trends, on the other hand, are as hard to grasp as the mist itself. Throughout California and the Western United States, some shifts driven by climate change are easy to see: increasing temperatures, shifting wind patterns and changing ocean currents. But many scientists believe that fog is declining, another casualty of global warming.
It is often their only source of water for months at a time.įog is essential for plants and animals, agriculture and human health, not only in California but in coastal zones around the world. The redwood trees towering in a clear blue sky soak up moisture from the fog on gray days. Its fingerprints are visible in the vast coastal forests, even when it isn’t hanging in the air. Fog is a defining element of summer in Santa Cruz, obscuring the view of day trippers descending the hills to the coast and prompting kids to bundle up to hop on their bikes for summer adventures.
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