Fog at the Guarulhos International Airport from 1951 to 2015

This paper presents and discusses the fog occurrences before and after the construction of the Guarulhos International Airport, using data from 1951 to 2015. The analysis showed the following: (1) a total of 19,816 h of fog were registered. (2) The minimum average, mean and maximum average of the fog temperature had significantly increased after the airport was constructed from 1.2 to 6.9, 12.1 to 14.5 and 20.2 to 20.7 °C, respectively, due to the urban development around the airport during the study period. (3) The average fog hours per year decreased by approximately 73.1%, i.e., from 492 ± 84.45 to 132 ± 54.51 h per year. (4) Most of the fog events occurred due to longwave cooling on clear nights with relatively low wind speeds (characterizing radiation fog), with over 65% having duration of 2 h and occurring in the early hours of the day during March–September period. (5) The maximum probability of fog occurrence dropped about 10% from before to after the construction of the airport. Finally, two fog events are investigated using data collected during the fog evolution using atmospheric sounding profiles (from an acoustic sounder) and automatic meteorological stations and preliminary results showed that the values of cooling rate and turbulent kinetic energy play key roles in the onset and growth-dissipation phases of the fog, respectively.