| Apr. 27th, 2009 @ 08:45 pm Критерии подобия -- в жизнь! |
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On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 7:05 PM, M. A. <...> wrote:
> The real
> interesting part of the flight was the difference in cloud bas[e]s.
> There were a few as high as 9K or over and the rest were 5-6K. And
> they were only a few miles apart. I have no idea why...
Very typical for strong convergence. This is the interface between two mesoscale airmasses with different temperature and moisture content. Folks at Omarama instilled this knowledge in me: step in the clouds is a good place to be. They see and fly it a lot. (I remember running one from Lake Avimore to near Burkes Pass "in tow" (lead-and-follow) behind G Dale.) It can be as sharp as a wall couple thousand feet high, or somewhat disorganized, more like gradually lowering bases over some distance. Tiger Country is a good place to catch this phenomenon, as marine layer squeezes through Delta, Altamont and Pacheco passes, meets valley air (Byron Highway convergence), fans out, wraps around and collides with itself over the high terrain (San
Antonio Valley convergence).
Still looking for a good fluid dynamics simulator to visualize this stuff. BlipMaps do a great job in predicting it, but they are static and take some imagination to visualize. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as it makes it so much more interesting) as these phenomena scale to the sizes we can comprehend and visualize on a map, medium parameters would have to be astronomical (colossal density, minuscule viscosity, ...) in order to maintain similar flow behavior (same Reynolds number etc.) on the scale model.
Truly fascinating. |
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