July is historically the foggiest month of the year here. So let’s roll out those “lazy, hazy, crazy days” of Bummer Summer, when the offshore fog bank does not “creep in on little cat feet” but squats sullenly on the city until well after noon.

“July really is the gloomiest month of the year in Santa Barbara,” said Park Williams, a Ph.D student in geography at UCSB who studies local fog patterns.

Using data for low-lying clouds at the Santa Barbara Airport from 1948 to the present, Williams calculated the average for July at 5.1 hours of fog per day, or five hours and six minutes before it's any fun to go to the beach.

August, Williams said, is the next foggiest month here, with an average 5 hours of fog daily. September takes third-place honors, with an average 4 hours and 30 minutes of daily fog.

 “June Gloom” comes in fourth, with 4.4 hours of fog every day. “May Gray” is in sixth place, after October.

In fact, Santa Barbara gets more than an hour of fog, on average, every day of the year, Williams said. The number of cloudy days is roughly the same, month by month, he said: it’s just that the clouds are lower in the spring and summer here than in the fall and winter.

California’s fog belt extends from Santa Barbara to San Francisco every spring and summer.  But the really foggy years, such as this one, typically occur during the 25-year cycle when the Pacific Ocean switches from warm to cool, Williams said. The current cool cycle began in 1997.

Cooler ocean waters bring more fog. Right now, Williams said, the water off our coast is 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the average for this time of year.

Moisture evaporating over cold water condenses much faster than over warm water and cools the air above the ocean. At the same time, warm air moving downwards because of high atmospheric pressure prevents the moist air from rising. The cool air, trapped under this “lid,” gets wetter and wetter until it forms a low cloud. This is the offshore “marine layer” that blows in over the city with the prevailing winds.

By Mary Koenig / SBN

March was the third foggiest month in the past 59 years, with an average 4.3 hours per day, compared to the historical average for March of 1.7 hours of fog daily. April, May and June this year placed in the top 10 for those months, too, with an average 3.7, 5.5 and 6.6 hours of fog daily, respectively.

“Over that entire period, this is a very abnormal year,” Williams said.

Steve LaDochy, a geographer at California State University-Los Angeles, said that warm Santa Ana winds this spring may have caused more fog because they blow a lot of dusty air offshore.

“You have to have particles for the water to condense on,” LaDochy said. “Santa Ana winds are just loaded with particles, and that gives us our dense fogs.”

Contact Melinda Burns at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it