The OG atmospheric ‘Throat Goat’ was hella thick yesterday morning, due to a perfect mix of weather conditions.
When I first visited San Francisco in 2012, my southern peculiarities — I was born and raised in the suburbs of North Texas, unfortunately — were thrown off-kilter by residents personifying the region’s foremost marine layer. In Texas, we have little fondness for our hellish hot temperatures and angry skies; whaling tornado sirens will do that to a population.
Gm to extra thicc @KarlTheFog today. pic.twitter.com/uLkRTOO0wW
— Underscore_SF (@Underscore_SF) December 5, 2023
But in San Francisco, it couldn’t be further from this. One must look no further than Karl The Fog to understand the city’s unique relationship with atmospheric swirlings.
Yesterday, December 5th, Karl The Fog “swallowed” San Francisco in the morning hours, enveloping the city in such a thick, gray blanket that the Bay Bridge wasn’t visible from the Embarcadero.
“Gm to extra thicc [Karl The Fog] this morning,” we cheekily posted on X, waxing chronically online millennials on the then-present density of San Francisco’s famous marine layer. The usual opaque morning haze has been especially stout the past week or so, though the fog was undoubtedly its thickest yet. Pillars of erected concrete still were shrouded in a grayness — windows of highrises offering a view into what a ground-level cloud would look like. The air, too, was chilled; Karl The Fog’s bulking-season density shrouded a considerable amount of the morning light and, by proxy, much of the solar warmth it could afford.
Social media was quick to wax poetic (and cheeky) about yesterday’s morning fog. Users on the platform formerly known as Twitter noted that the ostensibly omnipresent haze did a “number” on the city; a collection of media from user [at]aldot29 shows a cable car seemingly going into murky oblivion — an eerie, albeit happenstance nod to Stephen King’s “The Mist.”
.@KarlTheFog swallowed SF today. pic.twitter.com/mhxJ50QOmA
— Wook Chung (@wooky2000) December 5, 2023
Another user on the ill-fated X, [at]wooky2000, described Karl The Fog as having “swallowed” San Francisco this past Tuesday. We’ll not ever shy away from a prospect to hint at sexual innuendo, particularly when the chance includes a reference to an iconic banger from Grammy-winning trans artist Kim Petras; Karl The Fog is the original, the alpha, and the omega barometrical “Throat Goat.”
But why exactly was San Francisco’s fog so unusually thick on Tuesday, December 5th? It boiled — rather, condensed — down a few weather conditions that made for the perfect mixing of dense fog conditions.
According to National Weather Service Meteorologist Sarah McCorkle, who works in the SF Bay Area office, the fog covering the region on Monday and Tuesday originated over land due to the “high moisture content in the lower levels of the atmosphere,” per SFGate, and the seasonally cool temperatures exacerbated its density. This is not a rare weather pattern; it typically descends in the San Francisco Bay Area come late fall and winter when rain is on the forecast. Unlike summer fog — “Fogust,” in particular — Karl The Fog’s more autumnal coat begins forming over the land, rather than the ocean — meaning that there’s less of this haze lost in transit onto terra firma. The result of this in its ostensibly more extreme iterations was Tuesday morning’s engulfment.
Though the rest of this week is expected to warm up a bit, there’s a chance more rain could come our way again, courtesy of an anticipated low-pressure system entering the region later today. Parts of the SF Bay Area could experience ground frost on Thursday and Friday.
Whether we will see Karl The Fog swallow San Francisco again this week remains unclear. However, with many more weeks left in the fall and winter months, the odds are in our favor that he’ll have another opportunity to show off his fellatory prowess again.
