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Posted by Ray
on 9/18/2009, 5:21 am
69.205.81.50
Summary: a fantastic weekend for all outdoor activities...come and fly with us!
You want more? Like, maybe, which is the better soaring day? What's your definition of better, e.g. higher cloud base, or mean strength of boundary layer convection? The two are not inextricably linked. On Tuesday I predicted a bomb for Wednesday. No one flew, but I had to drive to Dansville to search for eyeglasses, and the sky was awesome. The cold advection was cranking so hard it overdeveloped, but later cycled back to partly sunny. Relatively low CCL (cloud condensation level = cloud base) courtesy of Lake Ontario but the thermals had to be butt kickers. That's also happening today, watch the sky. A lobe of + vorticity @ 500mb is swinging by to our NE, so the Adirondacks may get wet but we probably won't. So Saturday will have a nice, fresh airmass, which has already been primed for convection by today's thermals. And as long as such an airmass is worked on by the sun, and as long as we don't get on the back side of the high and get that nasty warm advection aloft accompanied by beautiful but thermal-killing cirrus, the soaring gets better. So Sunday's better, you ask? Not sure...very close call. To fine tune it would require another hour rummaging through a bunch of data fields and Skew-T Log-P charts that I don't have the time for. The high responsible for the great weekend is a monster, extending vertically to at least 200 mb (~ 39,000'), and spanning, in the North-South direction, the entire North American continent. We don't really get on the back side of the surface high till Monday AM, so as long as the cirrus stays away, we can fly late both days. I will bribe children to help me put ships away.
Ray
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