Go to Hawaii some time. The low islands - Lanai, Kahoolawe, Niihau - are all arid. Pretty much the same story all over the world. The volcanic, hilly islands are lush because the mountains and vegetation capture the moisture from whatever trade winds blow in their particular area of the world. Sort of like Lopez versus Orcas.

But the most interesting part of this story is that Charles grew up on a family wine orchard in Yamhill, Oregon. Good on your parents. Making that happen couldn't have been easy for a family from Brooklyn - as a number of his pieces have referenced. An iconoclast born of iconoclasts - no wonder he's such a frustrating and original thinker.

Looks like shallow ground fog.

Nice image. I especially love seeing ground fog from above, when it crawls down a valley floor like a glacier...

@1 but distinguish the effect of the mountain from the effect of the trees? And pulling down atmospheric water from pulling up groundwater.

Tamarisk trees are for sure effective at bringing up water, they can draw down the water table so far shallower-rooted plants can't survive; also they love to pull up salts and spread that around. Invasive bastards, beautiful too.

If I remember there is also a theory that tree emissions help seed rain? So that would be the opposite of Charles. https://phys.org/news/2016-10-trees-clou…

@1 in-laws. My family is from Zimbabwe.

WRONG it's the sun shining off glaciers in winter.

Sure, there is plenty of ongoing research about specific effects and feedback loops with clouds, but I want to make the point that the formation of clouds (and their sources of moisture) are quite well understood and explained in existing literature. Here are some relevant and interesting tidbits (yes, atmospheric sciences is what I do).

First, retained moisture in forests and vegetation is critical for keeping local high temperatures down (and keeping low temperatures from plunging too much). There is a reason that deserts are known for having extreme temperature fluctuations. If we cut down the forests on the edge of deserts, they can become desert and never again be able to support a forest -- it is the forest itself that maintains sufficient moisture for the tree to survive (in these dry areas). These effects on temperature are much larger and more impactful than any affect on cloud formation.

Nearly always, clouds are formed by the lifting of air, which cools it (by lowering the pressure of the air thanks to the higher altitude) down to the point where the new temperature can't hold the existing amount of water (hot air holds more water; indeed we all know hot air dries clothes faster -- cold air holds exponentially less). Fog can form this way if air is forced up a slope, but actually fog is typically the exception to the "clouds are formed by lifting" rule. With fog, air makes direct contact with something colder (a pond, frosty hills..) to bring the air temperature down; or it's formed when cold, trapped air right near the ground mixes with warmer air just above it, and the new mixed air mass is too cold for the existing water vapor so it condenses into fog. It is true that having a moisture source (a wet forest, a pond) thrown into the mix rather than the above processes taking place over parched earth means more water vapor will have evaporated into the existing air mass, making it easier for fog to form in the above methods. So yes, there is a good chance the scene in your photo would not have fog in it (or at least would have less fog) if the spot were turned into a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Sources of moisture for clouds are pretty well known and indeed can be well modeled. For low-level clouds and fog, soil moisture content and land-use (i.e. forest versus farmland versus urban versus snowpack...) can have direct and strong effects. Not just as a supply of moisture, but also due to differential heating. Land that heats up quickly in the sun (like a desert; not like a dense forest or a lake) will create updrafts, which will first be seen as puffy cottonball (cumulus) clouds. However, it is the large-scale atmospheric motions that are the main source of clouds. When the jet stream aims air from Hawaii to the PacNW, that moist and warmer air will be forced upwards over our existing cooler air mass, cooling it off to form clouds and dump lots of rain.

So...the known answer (more than just hypotheses here) is that most cloud formation is due to rising air caused by large-scale processes (or air forced over terrain like in @1's Hawaii example), and the sources of moisture are large bodies of (preferably warm, if you are going to get moist air) water. However, another major source of clouds (the heating of the ground by the sun leading to instability) is currently affected on the margins by land-use, which we humans affect. Removal of forests can have local affects, especially in dry areas away from bodies of water that also don't see large-scale weather patterns. So yes, if Phoenix were suddenly surrounded by large, dense forests, their cloud-cover and rainfall would increase. But if Hawaii -- whose source of moist air is the ocean -- were completely logged, they would see essentially the same amount of clouds and precipitation as before. Less fog in the valleys, though. Same with the PacNW: the source of moisture for our clouds is not local, and not from land.

@1, @4

Charles himself comes from a rarefied elite as well, of course; it is not just his in-laws who live in the upper crust.

Charles was born in Rhodesia, lived there for five years, moved to the US for a while, and then moved back to Zimbabwe (after independence) and spent his teens there, where his father was an economist in the Mugabe government, and his mother was a University professor. This was at a time where the basic structure of society and government in Zimbabwe was still colonial, only with the British authorities swapped out for high-ranking members of the native society.

He is many things, Mr Mudede, but one thing he is not is a product of poverty, nor even ordinary working-class or middle-class society. This is a man who has always known what the cream tastes like.

@7 so? He seems to realize the inequity in the world and is working to correct it.

Unlike all-too-many elite in the USA born-on-third-base or beyond, who think they are "self-made" and the poor aren't working hard enough. see: Trump, Bush, Romney...

It looks beautiful, but it could Delillo's "Airborne Toxic Event," the chemical spill from a rail car that releases a black noxious cloud, but the cloud is only real after it has been reported and defined,,,Charles has begun the definition,,,the government and the extraterrestrials are beginning the data gathering and transmission to the future of Hope...

I also like to gaze upon patches of fog in the forest. We are totally like twins.

@7 "known what cream tastes like"

That's not a thing people say.

@11

Oh it certainly isn't, I couldn't agree more. If you pay close attention, though, you will notice that this is just the sort of thing which people like Charles Mudede write.