How far you can see right now and over the next mornings — tule fog on the published Weather Service scales, with the official road and fog channels first.
Town Tools builds free, public tools for Bakersfield and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.
How far you can see right now around Bakersfield, and how the next mornings look, from the forecast model — with the official road and fog channels first. It will never tell you it’s safe to drive; that’s the road you can see, and Caltrans and the Weather Service.
Tule fog is the valley’s winter fog. It forms on calm, clear nights after rain — thickest before dawn, usually thinning by late morning — and runs roughly November through March. In the warm half of the year this page will almost always read clear.
Right now (modelled)
Good visibility — about over 6 mi.
As of 27 June at 7:15. A model’s estimate for the area around central Bakersfield, not a reading on your road.
The next 18 hours, from now.
| Time | Visibility | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| 7 am | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 8 am | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 9 am | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 10 am | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 11 am | over 6 mi | Clear |
| noon | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 1 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 2 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 3 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 4 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 5 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 6 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 7 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 8 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 9 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 10 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| 11 pm | over 6 mi | Clear |
| Sun midnight | over 6 mi | Clear |
A modelled estimate, not a measurement
The number is the forecast model’s visibility for the area, banded only on published scales: Mist from 1 to 5 km (about 0.6 to 3 mi), Fog below 1 km, Dense fog at or below a quarter of a mile (the US National Weather Service Dense Fog Advisory line, ~400 m), and Near-zero below about 200 ft — the most severe tier of NWS Hanford’s Fog Severity Index. It never tells you it is safe to drive; that call is yours, on the conditions you can see, and the official channels above.
Caltrans’ advice in fog: reduce your speed and turn on your low-beam headlights — never high beams, which bounce back off the fog, and never just parking lights. Nearly three in four fog-related collisions involve driving too fast for the conditions.
Use the painted line on the right edge of the road as your guide, not the centre line, to stay in your lane. Don’t stop on the travelled road or the shoulder, where you can be hit from behind — if you must pull off, get well clear of traffic and turn your lights off so others don’t follow you off the road.
Tule fog is radiation fog: on a calm, clear night after rain the ground cools, the damp air just above it cools too, and fog settles in the low valley — thickest just before dawn, often burning off by midday before reforming after dark. The valley is ringed by mountains on three sides, so once it forms it has a hard time clearing out.
Source: NWS — fog safety, checked 2026-06-27
Tule fog has been the leading cause of weather-related crashes in California. On the foggy morning of 3 November 2007 a chain-reaction pile-up of more than a hundred vehicles closed northbound Highway 99 near Fresno, killing two people, with visibility reported around 200 feet. The same low-visibility mornings happen on Highway 99, Highway 58 and Interstate 5 around Bakersfield.
Source: Tule fog — background, checked 2026-06-27
Through the foggy season the National Weather Service office in Hanford publishes a daily Fog Severity Index for the San Joaquin Valley, with Caltrans — a five-level, colour-coded read of the transportation risk, from green (no risk) to purple (0–200 ft visibility, the greatest risk). It’s the authoritative local picture; this page is a plain-words companion to it.
Source: NWS Hanford — Fog Severity Index, checked 2026-06-27
These are modelled estimates for the area around central Bakersfield, not measurements — a fog bank over the fields won’t show in an area-wide number. Weather data by Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0). Fog bands from the WMO and Met Office; the quarter-mile and 200 ft lines from the US National Weather Service.