Strong inversion

Su Campu

I took advantage of the nice weather and flew up to Sligo airport this morning. What an amazing morning, with calm winds and brilliant sunshine. On the way back I took some photos of the inversion that's been in place the past week. This is a layer or warmer air on top of cooler air near the surface. It's formed by the subsiding air from upper levels, warming and drying adiabatically as it does so. This causes all atmospheric pollutants to become trapped beneath the the inversion. Flying at 3000ft the visibility was pretty bad, so I climbed to 5500ft, and on passing through 4000ft the sky became brilliant blue, visibility was unlimited, and the layer of pollution could be seen below.

You can see the inversion at 900hPa in the Valentia sounding below. The dewpoint went from -8.8 to -17.1°C in the space of 70m!

Deep Easterly

Su Campu wrote: »

Those pics are a bit wide - how do I resize them?

You could upload them to Photobucket, as that gives you the option of resizing the photos before you upload them, or even after you have.

Regardless, those are stunning shots Su! I have noticed in the last few days that visibility is stark clear, yet there does seem to be slight upper haze which reduces the contrast of the sky. From your flight, how high would you reckon this haze was?

P.S, if you ever fly over the Galway/Mayo region, give us a wave!

Edit, just read your account rather than just admiring the pics, gives a good idea of the height .

Su Campu

Deep Easterly wrote: »

You could upload them to Photobucket, as that gives you the option of resizing the photos before you upload them, or even after you have.

Regardless, those are stunning shots Su! I have noticed in the last few days that visibility is stark clear, yet there does seem to be slight upper haze which reduces the contrast of the sky. From your flight, how high would you reckon this haze was?

P.S, if you ever fly over the Galway/Mayo region, give us a wave!

Edit, just read your account rather than just admiring the pics, gives a good idea of the height .

There, I've just resized them. You're right about the haze, but it's not so marked at the surface - it gets progressively worse the higher you go towards the inversion - so much so that I couldn't see much at all at 3000ft, and hearing that there was traffic coming in the opposite direction towards me, I decided to climb above it.

I was going to go to Knock, but decided Sligo would be a better scenic bet....and I was right, magnificent approach and departure over the sea!

Danno

Class photos. Thanks for sharing SC.

muckish

I'll presume this was the same inversion we saw from the summit of Muckish in Donegal last Thursday. It was strikingly dirty looking East but not too bad looking west.

Su Campu

That seems to be a lot lower. It's probably a shallow marine inversion formed over the cold sea nearby.

There seems to be a lot of proper snow still on that summit, I wonder how long it'll be before we see the last of it go from around the country's mountains?