Today’s Photo 12-8-10

It’s cold. Real cold for early December. 20ºF (6ºC). But with no wind, it was tolerable.

You may remember the link I gave you to the Center Weather Service Units. The observation before dawn this morning was BKN180 at ATL. For the non-aviators, that’s a layer of broken clouds at 18,000 feet over the Atlanta (ATL) airport. Something photographers will want to know -- and controllers/pilots should always keep in mind -- the automated weather reporting stations don’t report any cloud layers above 12,000 feet. Only the humans do that.

You might want to file that piece of information away for a rainy cloudy day. Like the day I had a guy stuck on top of a cloud layer, VFR at 17,500. When you start looking for a place to get him down, you might want to call a Tower with a human in it and ask them to look up before you bet somebody’s life on an ASOS/AWOS that is reporting CLR (clear).

That’s a little more important than taking pictures. But if I had believed all those other automated weather stations -- all reporting CLR this morning -- I would have missed this:


© Don Brown 2010 (Click on the picture to enlarge)

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Don Brown
December 8, 2010