The Namib is one of the driest places on Earth, and it runs on fog. Cold water from the Benguela Current chills the air over the Atlantic, and most mornings a grey wall of it rolls in over Walvis Bay and Swakopmund and far across the dunes. Beetles stand on their heads on the dune crests to drink it. Lichen fields and welwitschia live on it. At Gobabeb, 56 km inland, fog can bring in more water in a year than rain does.
In 2026, Ferran Garcia-Pichel's lab at Arizona State reported bacteria that live and feed inside fog itself. If fog is a habitat, it needs a map. FOG-WATCH starts with the question every field team asks first: where and when is the fog most reliable?
Share of hours that were foggy in each 0.25° ERA5 grid cell, over satellite imagery. Pick a coast, then drag or play through the months to watch the fog season move.
Run the Fog climatology workflow from the repo's Actions tab. It pulls ten years of hourly weather for each site and fills in these charts.
Share of all hours that were foggy, along a line running due east from the coast at Gobabeb's latitude.
How often each hour of the day is foggy, month by month. Local time.
Monthly share of foggy hours on three cold-current coasts.