22 May 2009 by Tristan Gooley
Early yesterday morning I was struck by the strong smell of smoke outside. It was not the smell of fresh fire, more the heavy scent of a diffuse smoke in a damp air, so I was not concerned. My initial thought was that a southerly breeze must be carrying the smoke from the nearest village up our way, but then there did not appear to be any breeze at all. The air was distinctly stagnant. The smell was not varying at all in the way that smoke carried on the wind does, growing weaker and stronger each second.
When I looked down into a valley the cause became clear. There was a temperature inversion, where warmer air sits on top of cooler air trapping it and everything in it close to the ground. The inversion layer can just be made out in this photo.
Tags: inversion, layer, smell, smoke, temperature |
08 September 2008 by Tristan Gooley
This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a ‘typical English country scene’. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.
The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.
The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.
In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which…
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Tags: coast, east, navigational, shadow, sheep, smoke, south, sunset, typical english country scene, west |
