What are Contrail Shadows?
Contrail shadows form when the long thin artificial clouds formed behind aircraft cast a shadow on a lower, or occasionally higher, layer of cloud. Contrails,…
Tag: aircraft
The First Long Contrail
It is very satisfying to notice the first long contrail, it’s one of the earliest warnings of a weather change. A front is likely on…
What are Fallstreak Holes in Clouds?
Fallstreak holes form when a part of a cloud falls out, leaving a hole. This happens when part of a cloud made of very cold…
How to Forecast Weather with Contrails
Below is a short excerpt from the book, The Secret World of Weather, on how contrails can be used to predict changes in weather Contrails…
Constant Bearing, Constant Danger
What does “constant bearing, constant danger” mean? And why does it sometimes lead to a very dangerous problem? This expression is a neat abbreviation of…
How to Use the UK Military’s Survival Compass to Tell the Time
A guest blog by John Hudson FRGS, the UK military’s Chief Survival Instructor. Direction finding in the military these days uses lots of technology, but…
EasyJet Calms Orographic Storms
My thanks to all the team at the Mosto Festival in Italy for organising such a fun event based around the theme of water. I…
What is a Distrail?
A distrail is the clear path through a cloud formed in the wake of an aircraft. Distrails form because the aircraft turns the water droplets…
Dauntless Air – Aerial Firefighters
It has been a fascinating few days working in Mineral Wells, Texas, with the incredible team at Dauntless Air, an aerial firefighting company. I was…
How to Gauge High Winds Using Trees
The tops of trees or other fixed objects in the middle distance make it easier to gauge the effect of the wind on clouds or…
22 Degree Halo and Contrail Shadow
My thanks to Alan Gibson, urbane forager and regular contributor to this blog, for another great image. In this picture we are looking at two…
Slick Lines
I noticed a good example of ‘slick lines’ in the sea from an aircraft the other day. These calmer lines are formed when a thin…
Tin Bird Trails
We may never know the exact method that the earliest explorers used to find their way, but there is a friendly finger of suspicion that…
Aircraft, Meteor, UFO? Help needed!
I hesitated before posting this. Working in a slightly unusual field I do have to guard against publishing anything that could be deemed ‘unreliable’. And,…
Unidentified Celestial Objects
I quickly reached for my camera when I saw these objects in the sky. The picture was taken without a tripod and so they are…