Watch the eddies writing in the fog pouring into the Bay Area.

by Mike Godsey, mike@iwindsurf.com

If you are a radiologist you will quickly find the counter-clockwise spinning eddy in the X-ray like satellite imagery from 8AM this morning.

For the rest of us the eddy is the stirred up pattern in the fog just west of the Golden Gate.

If you are totally “left brained” and just see a mess of gray you can use the green arrows to visualize where the eddy is located.

Notice how the counter-clockwise flow of the eddy throws southerly winds over most of the bay this morning.

Look for the long streamers of fog where the mass of SW flowing fog pours through south facing gaps in the coast range like the Hwy. 92 gap and the Muir gap.

Also notice that the streamers over San Pablo Bay are now SSW.

At dawn these streamers were pure S. so much of the wind that normal would go to Sherman Island was diverted into Napa Valley. Sometimes this happens on big Sherman Island days disappointing dawn patrollers.

At the 11:30 update today I looked like the  eddy would  die in the early afternoon.

If that had happened   a bit of  that NW wind you see over the outer waters curves in towards the coast. But it still has a SW cant north of the Bay Bridge which helps the East Bay  and Sherman Island.

Towards the Peninsula the wind would have taken a more W to WNW can due to the orientation of the San Bruno Gap and the location of the Altamont Pass as well as the pressure gradient to the southern Central Valley.

However as you can see in the video below the Golden Gate eddy did not begin to die until 3PM hence the weaker than forecast winds for the Peninsula and Sherman Island in the PM.