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FARGO — Forecasting temperatures this month has been both easy and hard. The persistent temperature inversion — air that gets warmer with height up to a few hundred or a few thousand feet — which has been responsible for all the foggy weather has kept our temperatures mostly within a fairly narrow range, mostly in the teens and 20s, so that's the easy part. The hard part is that the inversion is impacted by cloud cover. The typical sequence is as follows.
In the evening, the air cools near the ground, causing fog and low clouds to form. These low clouds cause outbound radiation to bounce back to the ground, and the temperatures begin to rise overnight. The following day, the fog disperses, and the low clouds move higher, causing the temperature to fall. All of this is within five to 15 degrees, but the process varies greatly from pace to place, depending on the thickness of the fog and the height of the low clouds.
