Bizarre temperature sensation tonight

[Dave Baker]

Just got back from walking the dog up to the farm in the moonlight. The forecast said it would drop to below freezing up here in Scottyland tonight but at midnight it still felt much like it has been in the sun earlier today. Warm and mild to the extent that instead of needing the usual fleece under my top jacket before going out I was wandering about with no fleece and my jacket unzipped and not feeling any hint of cold. Then I got home and checked the outside thermometer and it's just on or even a tad below zero which astonished me.

Maybe it's the total lack of wind for the first time in months. It's dead calm tonight. The windchill must make a huge difference to the feeling of cold but I'm still astonished that tonight feels so mild yet registers as freezing. Usually it's blowing a gale up here and it bites through whatever you're wearing in a couple of minutes so I guess it must just be that. Very odd though. It feels like a summer evening so perhaps we just get so used to bitter cold in the wind chill that anything less feels mild.

[Brian Gaff]

It is just the wind. we all keep a warm layer of air around us and this is disrupted by wind. also I suspect if you had gone out with a slightly damp exposed skin area you would have felt that it was colder. As it evaporated due to the warm layer it should take much more heat than normal. Brian

[Jethro_uk]

There was an interview recently - on the BBC site IIRC - with a member of the UK team that went to the South Pole. They said that even when it was

-15C, they could take their tops off, if the air was still.

[fred]

Temperature inversion

I once took off in a light aircraft and when I got to about 1000 feet there was this phenomenon at that level. A local power station was on full blast and when the smoke hit this level it was trapped there and spread across the sky like a river.

[Bill Wright]

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Very relevant at the moment given the disturbance to TV reception.

We?re getting complaints from Belmont viewers in S Yorkshire about loss of reception. Complaints from Belmont viewers in the Hull area (where the aerials point south) are more strident. Apparently some people who have tried a retune because of loss of reception have been rewarded with London programmes. It?s foggy on the coast by the way.

Bill

[Nightjar]

It is foggy on the South Coast. Driving through Brighton earlier, the Palace Pier was not visible from the West Pier, for those who know the area.

Colin Bignell

[Tim Streater]

Does fog absorb the relevant frequencies? I happened to do a retune last night during the fog and lost channel 55 and others. More than half the tunable stations, in fact. Got them back now.

[GMM]

I seem to recall hearing something on the radio yesterday about a temperature inversion beign predicted in Scotland. Dunno if that ahd anything to do with it (or, indeed, what a temperature inversion is!).

[Bill Wright]

No, it's just that fog is often accompanied by temperature inversion, which ducts signals over the horizon. The reason you lose reception is because your local signal is swamped by distant ones.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

It's a condition in which the body gets colder instead of warmer during vigorous exercise. I experienced it a few weeks ago during the freezing weather when the back gate, which is some considerable distance from the house and up a steep hill, was banging annoyingly in the wind. I went out at 4am to fasten it, without bothering to dress, and suffered a severe temperature inversion. However it was a good test of the acuity of the CCTV. When I looked at the pictures the next morning every tiny shrunken thing was visible.

Bill