By Mike Godsey

If you have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for long, you know that southerly ocean winds in the summer mean a deepening of the Marine Layer Clouds.

And with the increasing frequency of eddies and southerly coast winds, it often seems that our fog is becoming thicker despite all the research suggesting that warming is producing a thinner, less intrusive marine layer on average.

But today, we had an eddy that actually promoted the very rapid clearing of an exceptionally deep and intrusive marine layer. Even more interesting the clouds did not burn back but were actually blown westward out of the Golden Gate. This animation shows how an eddy can actually produce clearing rather than deepening the marine layer.