So from all our articles on fog appearances, we figured out that there was something else in the air along with high humidity when fog happens. With some research, we discovered these really small, yet really important molecules, called cloud condensation nuclei, or CCNs for short. These particles are things like dust, smoke, ash, or dirt and they allow water vapor to condense on them. As water vapor molecules are attracted to one another and condense on a CCN, they make a fog droplet! As more and more water molecules condense, we think the fog must get thicker and thicker--or maybe the size of the CCN plays a role, we're not sure.
We spent a lot of time thinking and discussing this process...only to revise our fog models yet again. It seems like we have discovered the missing piece to our fog! And it also means that when we thought we were making fog on Friday, we were really just making steam.
From our modeling and feedback to one another through a gallery walk, we established consensus on how a fog droplet is formed:
It seems like we were missing some CCNs in our classroom! So we brainstormed some investigation ideas to get CCNs into our classroom (safely), and came up with these ideas:
We think that tomorrow we'll have some FOG! Oh yeah!