First Day of the Season
Tinto South, 10th Feb 2008
An excellent day at Tinto, with a great turnout and everyone getting back into the swing of it. We spent some time (in the gloom ) discussing how the day would develop, and it did - in the most interesting way. I hope someone will give us an account of the flying, this is just some ideas about how the conditions developed.
There were large areas of fog, which I had taken to be radiation fog, but turned out to be advection fog caused by the moisture in the new airmass which moved in overnight. The temperature at the stile was 3.5 and about 10 in the sunshine half way up Greenhill. At first there was a SE breeze on the top of Greenhill, but as the inversion rose this wind rose above hill top height, and it was almost calm. Very weak thermals tried to climb the hill but the ground inversion trapping the fog only began to clear after 1. The thermic peak of the day was delayed because the sun got to the ground so late.
For about 30 miutes, there were small but workable thermals up to 2300 at the Dimple, starting to fade as the sun got lower, then around 3:00 a due S met wind of about 20 kmh appeared giving lovely smooth soaring to 2700, but for only about 20 minutes. I guessed this was the upper wind being mixed down by thermals. (This breeze just touched the top of Greenhill giving a strong breeze on the top but with no lift ).
Se we effectively had 2 peaks to the day for different reasons!
Looking over the back to the NE a wall of really damp was piling in off the N sea from Edinburgh, and in fact, it got as far as Lamington in the Clyde valley where we could see smoke showing a distinct NE!
We flew down to the Tinto Hotel as the fog was starting to reform.
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