Heavy fog causes traffic jams

Al Ain: Thick fog enveloped most coastal and some inland areas on Sunday morning, catching motorists unawares and leading to traffic jams on some major roads.

Visibility was reduced to 15 metres in Jebel Ali and considerably less in other areas. People driving early in the morning reported extremely poor visibility on roads all along the western coastline between Ghantoot and Ras Al Khaimah. Light fog was also reported in Fujairah.

The National Centre of Meteorology and Seismology (NCMS) also reported fog patches on the Al Ain-Abu Dhabi Road, Dubai-Al Ain Road, Emirates Road, and Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Road. Residents in Al Dafrah and Sharjah also woke up to dense fog.

“It was dense! I was barely able to see a few feet,” said Jonathan Reed, a Sharjah resident, who woke up at 6am to get ready for work.

He was surprised as fog was not forecast.

“It was unusual, isn’t it?” he said.

Mohammad Saeed, an expatriate salesman, said he encountered heavy fog on the Dubai-Al Ain Road between Al Faqqa and Al Hayer at around 7am.

“I was surprised as there was no fog forecast,” he said.

A forecaster said the fog was a result of rising humidity, low temperatures at night, and a slow-moving wind. Such phenomena are not unusual this time of year due to the contrasting daytime high temperatures and low temperatures at night.

According to the NCMS the weather will be fair to partly cloudy at times for the next 48 hours. It will be mostly partly cloudy in the eastern emirates by the afternoon. The daytime temperature is expected to rise, especially in the western emirates. The wind is likely to be light to moderately rough. The humidity will increase at night and early in the morning.