Transcription
So anyway, uh, we'll go ahead and get into thunderstorms, so you get a little bit better understanding of, uh, what they are, uh, what happens when they occur, how long they last, uh, and then, of course, in the second half of the semester, we'll show you where they're located. In, in Mears, we'll start off with something that's very familiar. So I know I've shown this chart before, uh, which it has a reference down in the lower right-hand corner from Glim, uh, as far as stability. So we have already kind of beaten this chart up a little bit as far as in, you know, unstable environments, of course, are on the left-hand side, and then the other two are, you know, stable, which we don't care about today, and then equilibrium, which we'll touch on, but it's really not an issue today. Right? So what we're really concerned with as far as this chart's concerned is only this little column over here on the left. So just to remind you, if you, for out of course, you raise that balloon up to that 5,000 ft level, you look at the temperature within the balloon and see how it compares to the environment that surrounds it. And of course, it's warmer, and just like that mulf your brothers, right? The balloon's going to keep going up until the temperatures inside and outside the balloon start to equalize, and then it'll stop its ascent because it becomes more stable via equilibrium. And then eventually it cools off inside the balloon and then it starts to descend because, because of density. So it's kind of pretty straightforward. Um, but there's a couple things I want to point out to you. So, uh, I want to remind you of the lapse rate, right? So, uh, with a dry adiabatic lapse rate, that goes up at 3 degrees Celsius per thousand feet. So every, uh, thousand feet that parcel of air will decrease in its temperature by 3 degrees. And then eventually it's going to get to a certain point, that lift condensation level, where clouds start to form, where it slows down because it's going through that process of condensing. Uh, and in that process, it slows the parcel down to 2 degrees Celsius per thousand feet. But as we'll start to walk through and understand thunderstorms, uh, you'll start to see that it's important to understand these temperature differences. Uh, thunderstorms can actually have a much greater temperature change. Change. So in other words, instead of 3 degrees Celsius per thousand feet, some of that energy that's down at the surface, as it starts to rise because of, let's say, intensive heating from the sun, um, it can go up 6, 7 degrees Celsius per thousand feet. I mean, a lot of energy, and it starts jamming up over, you know, like 2,000 feet per minute, or, you know, I mean, very quickly. Uh, so as it starts to rise, of course, that energy goes through that lifted condensation level. Some of those molecules, of course, will condense, but the rest of them will just continue to go up until eventually, over time, you know, you know, they'll cool off and stuff. But don't forget, this is like an active system, right? So I mean, explanations like that, you visualize a parcel of air and you think, okay, well, all you're thinking about is just that parcel, but of course, it's a much bigger issue, right? So it's, there's a whole bunch of atmosphere that continues to go up. So one parcel goes up, and then there's others that follow right behind it. So you have to remember that there's just a lot of energy. Uh, we'll show, I'll show you a video that I added, uh, which kind of shows you the difference between, you know, the cumulus clouds that it starts off with, and then it goes to like these towering cumulus, and eventually deforms into to thunderstorms. Um, and if they get big enough, they can become supercell, right? So just remember the 2 degrees Celsius per thousand feet, right? That's the FAA thing that they want you to remember. 3 degrees Celsius per thousand feet, which you need to remember for my class, so you understand how and why thunderstorms start to happen. Um, but that's just the beginning because as a thunderstorm continues to form, it usually requires a little bit more energy. So you will have the super adiabatic, which is greater than 3 degrees Celsius per thousand feet. So you, you don't have to remember individual numbers, you just have to remember two. Uh, when you're studying for my exams and the FAA, but also it's more about what's more important is like your, your understanding of how and why it happens because if you can understand that, um, you'll feel a lot more confident when you're flying around thunderstorms. Like during the summer, it's kind of waning off a little bit, you know, as the temperatures start to cool as we get into fall. Um, but they're still hanging out and, uh, we can get some, still can get some pretty nasty ones. So, um, anyway, pay attention to the weather as we kind of work through this, um, uh, through this semester and and take a look at the thunderstorms that are happening around the country and kind of the havoc that that is caused by it. Um, more also, uh, something else we need to understand is, uh, about dew point and humidity. So I know this is kind of a boring slide because all it has is a bunch of words, but it's great for studying, by the way. But what, what I put in here is to help you understand a little bit more about the differences between dew point and humidity. So most of the time when you watch on TV news, you, you know, they refer to everything generally speaking in humidity because if they throw out dew point, people are like, what's that? Pilots need to know about dew point because of course, that's what we look at in comparison to the temperature of the environment to find out if it's getting close enough, the temperature in the dew point to create fog or visible moisture because obviously that's going to affect us. Uh, and also taking a look at those numbers, we can get an idea, of course, because we learned how to calculate it, how high the clouds are, right? So all that stuff's really handy, but it's kind of for someone who's not a pilot, is kind of irrelevant, you know, unless you know, like trivia, oh, where's the ceilings on the clouds. Um, but it's important for us, especially as VFR pilots, or when we do fly VFR. Uh, humidity on the other s, on other, uh, on the other hand, uh, is, they're similar but different. So we know when the temperature and dew point meet, right? They can form visible moisture. We also know if the temperature and dew point meet, that also equates to 100% humidity. So they're similar but different how they're described. So humidity is just a measurement of the percentage of water vapor contained within a parcel of air, right? Because you always hear it's 50% humidity, it's 80% humidity, whatever. So it's just a percentage of how much water vapor. And as the, as the air starts to warm, right, it's able to hold, it doesn't really necessarily hold, uh, more water vapor. There's more, more water vapor usually ends up within that parcel of air because in the process of evaporation, which puts the water vapor in, in the air parcel, um, it gets to a certain point. As it gets warmer, more and more water vapor will, will evaporate into the warmer air, but the air continues to expand, right? And as this more evaporation, more expansion, so the hotter it gets, the more water vapor that is contained within the air, right? So it would take quite a bit to get the temperature to come back down to create clouds. So that's usually why when it's thunderstorm season, that if the dew points are higher, right, you'll start to get it, you'll feel like muggy, right? Because there's a lot, because it's warmer, there's more, uh, water vapor inside. If you look at it as a huge parcel of air, and because of that, when you go outside, you take a shower, and you go outside, and you're in the Midwest or back East during the summer, whatever, you know, you start to kind of sweat, and it doesn't evaporate off your skin as fast, um, it's because of the water vapor. So it's, it's not evaporating, and because of that, you feel sticky and yucky and stuff like that during really humid days, right? But eventually, all that energy and water vapor will continue to travel upwards in the atmosphere sphere because of the heat, and eventually gets to that certain point, that lifted condensation level. But because of it, it has so much energy, the clouds don't form till way higher. So I had mentioned earlier that when you fly around in thunderstorm days, or if not, I'll mention it today, uh, usually the ceilings are right around somewhere between 7 and 9,000 feet. So it's pretty high up there because that's how high it has to go before it's cooled off enough where some of those molecules will actually condense into, uh, visible moisture. And then the rest that don't condense right away, continue to go up. So we'll see that here in a second in this cool little video. So hopefully that explains it a little bit better. Humidity, remember, is just a percentage of the amount of water vapor contained within a parcel of air. And dew point is an actual measurement that we use to compare with the temperature to find out whether or not we're going to get, uh, visible moisture at the ground, or when you calculate it, where will it happen as we go up into the atmosphere? We're doing our cloud calculation.
All right, so, uh, convection and thermals. So, um, convection, that, you know, the process, I've talked about it already when I talked about the bonfire and the beach and stuff. This is similar. This is kind of a nice, well-laid out, uh, graphic to explain all the different stages. Um, but it's also a reminder as we start to go through thunderstorms and understand thunderstorms, just, just remember, you know, the red that's indicated down at the bottom is just kind of telling you there's a lot of heat, or, you know, a lot of heating in that little parcel of air that's close to the surface, right? As this, as the sun starts to heat up the surface, uh, through conduction, right, the air that's just above the surface will conduct all that heat that the sun was giving it, and then eventually that starts to turn into that convection, uh, as it starts to rise up in the atmosphere, and you start that whole process, right, where the air goes up, stabilizes, comes back down, it kind of joins the party again, and it starts into this big, huge, uh, kind of round robin thing that continues to build until, of course, the sun goes down or for some reason it cools off and the energy starts to go away, right? Um, so this is a reminder of the superadiabatic, right? For studying, uh, just remember that you only have to remember those two numbers, and it's just greater than three. So thunderstorm season, of course, it is going to be super adiabatic, uh, in order to create the thunderstorms. This gives you a reminder of how fast those things, uh, travel upwards, which is, uh, very fast. So, uh, areas, you know, this just kind of lists different areas that, uh, warm up faster than others. Remember, it's differential heating, so you're not always going to have a thunderstorm in the same place, even though like in Southern California, we will get pretty consistent, like Mount Wilson, uh, San Antonio, like Palm Springs area, that kind of stuff. Uh, if you're flying, uh, or, you know, cruising around some of these areas where thunderstorms build up, you can also see birds circling, and sometimes you can see it even locally, uh, for some of the rising air that you can't necessarily see, but you'll see just, they'll, they'll just be circling around, and that's what they're doing. Is they're getting those thermal updrafts, uh, from that heating, and just it allows them to stay aloft and not have to flap their wings as much, and, uh, they can, you know, they can kind of do their thing without working so hard, which is kind of cool. But, uh, if you're a glider pilot, that's like super important because that's where you get most of your lift that's associated with being able to fly your glider as far as possible. Uh, interesting things about, uh, gliders is you can go from like Southern California all the way up to Northern California, and some people can go up the coast in gliders. It's pretty amazing during, if you get the right, uh, environmental conditions for them to be able to do that, they can go for pretty long distances. It's pretty amazing.
All right, so what we have here is just a, a kind of a visual explanation of convection. So this is kind of a neat experiment. Of course, we're not in the classroom, so I can't do this myself. And, uh, if I did, I didn't have the little special container that he had made up, you'll see that later, um, which is kind of cool. Uh, things that I want to bring up is he's going to show, you can see those four bottles that are in front of him. Uh, you know, two of the bottles are going to be set up, uh, with either warm or cold water on the top, and just the opposite on the bottom, right? So warm will be on the top, cold will be on the bottom, or vice versa. What I want you to do is think about the stability, uh, that is formed from inversion layers, right? And inversion layer is for us, uh, when we think of that lapse rate, right? That 2 degrees Celsius per thousand feet, that's what we memorize, and that's what we anticipate will happen as we start to climb. All right? That's important. Um, but Southern California, we get those inversion rates, or I'm sorry, inversion layers, and so as you start to climb, you'll hit a certain altitude, and that temperature starts going up instead of down, which is super annoying when you're, you know, trying to do flight training, and it's warmer aloft than it is down to the ground, and you know, those little planes don't have air conditioning, so it's super annoying. Anyway, um, my point is, he gives a great demonstration of what would be an inversion. So one of these is going to fill up, will act like an inversion. Uh, the other thing is, of course, he uses the word brown cloud, which could be very confusing for most of us who grew up in Southern California, especially for me, since this actually existed when I was a kid, which is smog. So we get it, it's pretty rare today, um, but essentially, it's just because we get inversion layers, and it kind of keeps everything down. So because the air doesn't circulate, all the crap that's in the air, whether it came from a Santa Ana or pollution or whatever, kind of stays down, kind of gets way down. So let me go ahead and play the video. Pay attention if you see something that looks like an inversion, go ahead and throw it out there.
Welcome back. I'm Steve Spangler, and we're talking about the science of weather and some cool experiments that you can try to demonstrate weather phenomena. I'm standing in front of this white wall because I want you to see some great color mixing going on as we explore the science of convection, or the mixing of air. Now, to demonstrate this, I'm using some simple things. This, uh, is water. It's cold water over here, and warm water, the warmest water I can get out of the tap over here. I've just colored it blue being cold and and yellow being warm. Let's fill two bottles with the warm water and two bottles with the cold water. Let's take a playing card and put the playing card right on top like this and turn the whole thing upside down and put this on the top. The only thing that separates these two is the playing card. So when I pull it away, it will allow the two liquids to be able to touch. All right, watch this here we go. Let me pull it away and, and if I have a steady hand, it stays right there. Look at the mixing that we get. The warm water is working its way up to the top, and the cold water, that's more dense, is working its way down here. This motion that you see here of the hot rising and the cold falling down is what we call convection, and these convection currents move air in the atmosphere. Now, we'll put the cold water on the bottom and the hot water water on the top. The card separates the two until we pull it out and watch what happens. If you predicted that nothing would happen, you were absolutely correct. The cold remains on the bottom, and the hot remains on the top. Why? Well, the cold water is more dense, those molecules closer together than the hot water. And how we relate it to weather is we look at the difference in the air, the hot air on the top and the cold air on the bottom. In the winter time, it's common for the cold air to get trapped on the bottom closest to the earth with a warmer layer of air sitting on the top. And when that happens, you get stagnant air in the very middle here. Take a look at this. Do you see the only area that is starting to even turn green where we're seeing mixing at all is right there between the two bottles. Many cities, this is called the brown cloud. All the pollution that's trapped down closest to the earth with automobiles and industry doesn't get circulated like it would over here with the convection currents. And so you get this brown cloud that hovers over the city, and that's not a good thing at all. You know, this is really important, and I've got another experiment. I think that you'll be able to see the brown cloud even better. Take a look at this cool box. It's actually a really narrow aquarium with a divider that separates two sides. Pretty tricky. All right, here's what we're going to do. Instead of me deciding which one goes on the top and which one goes on the bottom, I'll take the warm water on this side, yellow, cold water on this side, pour them in exactly at the same time, and then when they're at the same level, we'll pull the divider and see what happens. Bingo. There it is. Look at this. Yellow on this side, blue on this side. Let's let the water make the decision as to what happens here. We go. Watch. And there it goes. Look. Does that look awesome? Look at this. Notice how that blue works its way on the bottom. More dense molecules are closer together there with that cold, and it sits there on that bottom. So the cold stays on the bottom, and notice how that warmer layer, the yellow layer, stays right there on the very top. And now take a look at that center layer where the two has started to mix. If you're going to study the brown cloud or look at that smog effect, you really get to see what happens when the colder air is trapped on the bottom with the warmer air on the top, and you get this layer represented by the green here, just the brown cloud.
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So, uh, put in dust devils. This is a little bit of a side. I couldn't really figure out where to put this. This is really interesting, though. Um, dust devils are something most of us have seen before. Um, if anybody recognizes something like this, you know, you can go ahead and throw something out, which is kind of nice. Um, but if you're driving across the desert, you'll see these during warm days. Uh, sometimes you can see them on playing fields if you like baseball or football or, or just big parking lots and stuff. Uh, every once in a while, you get that, and it's that dry adiabatic, right? So that 3 degrees Celsius or greater, uh, per thousand feet. So as the, as the surface starts to heat up, it creates that low pressure area, and as it starts to rise, it twists. Of course, we all know why that happens, right? Because all right now, because of the Coriolis effect, of course, it does twist. It turns into this like, it looks like a, you know, you know, tornado. It's not a tornado, but it looks like one. But they are called dust devils. Of course, they're not associated with the storm itself, uh, but just rising air that's rising very quickly. There usually is a breeze associated with it. So once it starts to form, it will start to move across, let's say, the desert or the field or, or whatever. All right, uh, they are kind of, they're not humongous, right? So it's say 5 to 100 feet wide, but 100 feet is pretty big. Um, and then you can see how big it is relative to those people in that last shot. They don't last very long, of course. And, uh, yeah, it doesn't matter if you can spill it or not, don't worry about it. So, uh, and then they go up to 100 to 300 feet. I mean, one of those, if I'm looking at the trees and stuff, and that center one, that's, uh, that's a little higher than 300 feet. So just like everything else in science, it's not perfect, you know, some will go higher, some will go lower. You just get the idea that they can be fairly tall. Um, they do move with the relative wind as the wind starts to blow. And, uh, and here's kind of a really important, uh, point, especially for pilots, because it's affected me personally, uh, is the wind shear that's associated with the dust devil. So, uh, if you for some reason were to get into, well, back in the day, this guy named Jack Coey decided to measure what the shear is, and this was like back in 1971. And what he found out is the wind shear contained within these dust devils could be actually large enough to exceed the load factor of your actual airplane. So in other words, you could bend or break something trying to fly through one of these in an aircraft. But, uh, dust devils are just, just fun to look at, like thunderstorms, right? You don't want to fly through them.
So let's kind of move into thunderstorms themselves, and let's kind of learn about like, where do they start? How do they progress? And when do they kind of peter out, right? So there are three, three different, uh, things that we're going to be looking at, but we'll start off first with understanding cumulus form clouds. Now, we've talked a little bit about that where, uh, I show fair weather cumulus like this, where you can see the instability associated with the cloud itself, where the air is traveling upwards first, versus as the air starts to, you know, equalize and come back down, it creates high pressure in between those clouds, which creates the blue area in between. So low and high. So we start off with the cumulus clouds showing instability. As we start to move towards, you can see the flat bottom with that lifted condensation level, which you're all familiar with. And, uh, let's keep going, and there should be one more. There we go. So, and the air will continue to go up, uh, past the cloud as it starts to equalize and starts coming back down. Uh, cumulus form clouds, uh, similar to what we just saw in the other picture. So you get a visual of what they actually look like, but this is what is happening, uh, that I described. So you can see the arrows pointing, of course, because we have that lower pressure as the heat is rising and, you know, creating clouds versus the higher pressure on the sides. And the important part about this visual is that you can see the shear. The shear being the difference in in direction of the airflow, and it's that part in a thunderstorm which is really nasty. So the shears, the shear points within a thunderstorm, or even something like this, this is what gives you a lot of that turbulence, uh, when you're flying. So even on a fair weather day, which I think I'll show you a picture here in a little bit, as, as I was cruising doing an aircraft delivery, um, it gets bumpy, right? So this is one of the reasons why those bumps occur is because of those, the different, the vertical movement of the actual air itself. All right, so it, of course, will continue climbing till it hits the equilibrium. So to give you a better idea of what that looks like, uh, I have this little short video. You'll see that whole convection current starting to, starting to happen, which is kind of neat. You can see the energy. I mean, it's ridiculous how much energy these towering cumulus have, and then the thunderstorm will be most likely forming in the center. We just can't really see the rain portion of it. See it, click to a second video within it. There you go. There's a second half. You can see more of the convection and all those different areas of heating. You see the air traveling up and then rotating back down. You can see it kind of disperse as it's descending. You can see rain in the background underneath the clouds. So it's pretty crazy how much energy these, these, these towering cumulus and thunderstorms have. Um, I flew a flight, uh, across the country in a Cessna 210, and I started off at a lower altitude where I didn't have to wear oxygen, just cruising along. I think it was like 9,500 feet. And as I continued to fly, some of these clouds were starting to climb up towards my plane in the Midwest, and I thought, oh, that's kind of cool looking. And as it got closer and closer, I realized I had to climb to stay out of the clouds. So I continued to climb up. I got up to like 17,500 feet, kept cruising along and looking down and realizing I'm not going to win this race. They continued to climb up towards me. It was, it was ridiculous how fast these things could climb. So eventually I realized I'm, I can't climb this thing any higher. I could, but I, I didn't want to. Um, and I found a nice area that I could descend through so I could go below the clouds, even though it was going to be bumpier underneath, but I wouldn't have to fight getting in or around the thunderstorms as they continue to build throughout the day, because it would just get worse. So something to keep in mind, especially when you're flying around clouds like this, they are going to get bigger, not smaller. So be very careful as you start to fly in different parts of the country outside of Southern California, because this stuff can happen, and it happens pretty quickly.
All right, so components that you have to understand about a thunderstorm. So if we were looking at, in this case, I'm showing an isolated thunderstorm, we're talking about, but it, it applies to all thunderstorms. Um, it's just the worst, worse, the bigger or kind of gnarlier the thunderstorm is, it just takes this stuff and just makes it worse, like more lightning, more thunder, that kind of stuff. So it is local. It's started by cumulus, flower cumulus, like you saw in the video that we were just looking at. And, uh, within a thunderstorm, it will produce lightning, and from the lightning, after you, the bolt happens, you'll get the thunder because of the big differences in temperature as it's whipped through the air. We'll see the, the temperature of that here in a minute. Um, strong wind gusts that you'll get out of the bottom. It's really important for you to understand that because if there's a thunderstorm in the location in which you're trying to take off, uh, even though it might be miles away, right? An example would be Big Bear, where they get these thunderstorms certain times of the year, usually around August, September, and you can be at the airport and you're ready to take off, and all of a sudden, you'll see a big huge wind shift, and it's usually because there's an outflow coming out from the thunderstorm, and it's blasting across the runway, and that's pretty dangerous. So got to pay attention. There could be huge wind gusts, uh, heavy rain, and hail could be associated. Just depends on the thunderstorm whether it wants to give it. Usually, you will get heavy rain, of course, from the thunderstorm because that's what thunderstorms are defined by. Uh, hail, you don't always get it, but it's there. Um, and it usually spits out the back of the thunderstorm, outside of that, that, that long sheet that you see on the top, uh, that comes out the back of the thunderstorm. So we'll talk about that here in a minute. Uh, significant turbulence, of course, is nasty, that shear that's contained within it. And then, of course, they last for two hours. So this is also a good study slide, and to remind you that they last two hours, but the two hours is started, like your timer, right? You will start that when rain starts coming out of the bottom of that towering cumulus. Well, when it's no longer a towering cumulus cloud, it turns into a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms don't happen until there's actually a full convective current. So towering cumulus is just all the energy is going up. A thunderstorm is when the energy goes up and it comes back down, it creates that whole circuit. And once that starts, it usually lasts somewhere around two hours, right? But nature, so give it, give it, you know, you know, it could be longer or shorter, but for the most part, on average, it lasts about two hours.
So let's see. So what I like to get into now and show you in a visual way is, uh, the three stages of a thunderstorm. All right, so now that we know what's in a thunderstorm, we need to understand where they form and what those three stages are. Why is it important for you to learn the three stages? Is because you will be asked most likely in your check ride, and, and just about, I think every interview I've ever had, they've asked, well, do please explain the three stages of a thunderstorm. And there's good reason for it because of course, thunderstorms are bad, and they don't want you to fly in them. They want to make sure that you understand that so you can respect them and not break their airplanes apart. Um, you know, because we all want to live to fly another day, right? So the three stages starts with the cumulus stage. So we saw that in the video where we saw some of those cumulus clouds starting to build, and we saw it was just a straight, they were just, just going up. Um, but that's the growth phase. So as you can see in the picture, all the energy for the most part is going up, right? It's creating a very low pressure, starting to go up in the atmosphere. There's a lot of energy contained within all those molecules and all those parcels of air as they continue to climb up and, uh, push, push higher, high, higher and higher into the atmosphere. And some of those clouds, as you can see here, they can go up to like 20,000 feet before they become a thunderstorm. So they can get really high, very fast, and, uh, before they eventually start to slow down and then it starts to create that convective current. Maybe doesn't always, so it just depends. So the second stage is the mature stage. So the first stage, all the energy is going up. The second stage is the mature stage, and this is when it becomes a thunderstorm. So you have the air traveling in, and you have the air traveling out, and that's where those cold air, you know, like the, the blast of cold air that you get from a thunderstorm, it comes from this. So it doesn't have to be dissipating, which we'll see in a second, um, but it could be anytime that the rain starts to fall out of the bottom of a thunderstorm. You can get all sorts of nasty stuff, right? So, and we'll see some of that a little bit later, not in this one, when we talk about wind shear and stuff, we'll see videos on it. It's pretty wild. Anyway, um, but the key thing to remember is thunderstorms become a thunderstorm when the air goes in and the rain comes out of the bottom. If you just remember rain coming out of the bottom, you'll nail it, right? So that's the second stage, right? So you can see the difference there, a lot of activity. Oh, you also see the equilibrium level, right? So you see that yellow line. This is showing, of course, where the energy starts to slow down, right? Now, you'll still have stuff continuing to kind of be pushed up a little bit higher. Generally speaking, that equilibrium line, as you can see where it's located at, if you look at the altitudes on the side, it's around 36,000 feet, which is the top of the tropopause, right? As it gets into the stratosphere, it starts to slow down because the temperatures start to increase, right? And increasing temperatures creates stability, kind of like that inversion layer. And because of that, the clouds can't form or continue to travel upwards, or at least there's got to be enough energy to push them up, right? So some of these thunderstorms can actually top, you know, easily go through 36,000 feet, 40,000, sometimes up to 60,000 feet. They can push up really high, just depends on how much energy is kind of behind it all. All right, the third stage is the dissipating stage. This is basically when it's kind of petered out. All the energy starting to go away. The sun's going down, or it's later in the afternoon, and so there's not as much energy feeding that thunderstorm. So that inflow eventually kind of gets cut off, and so it, you know, whatever's left keeps going up, but most of the thunderstorm at this point is starting to kind of shut down. And when it shuts down, of course, there's nothing keeping things aloft like, like, uh, hail and water or precipitation. And because of that, it just, because of gravity, just starts to come out the bottom. So it dissipates essentially like flushing a toilet, right? So it flushes it, all comes out, and eventually the thunderstorm goes away too. So I can start again, you know, the next day. Um, but you can see at the very top, that equilibrium level where that it levels off, and that anvil that comes out the back end will start to stretch out, and eventually that will dissipate itself, but that's all ice. So it doesn't go away usually as fast. Um, so remember those three stages, right? The cumulus as it starts to grow, and then you have the mature stage, which is the second one, where rain starts to fall out of the bottom, and then the dissipating stage, where the inflow is cut off, and pretty much the rest of the thunderstorm is just kind of dumping and getting rid of whatever energy and, and, and particles and stuff like that have been left inside it, start to come out. So three stages, so very important for a lot of your interviews, so keep that in mind. That's how a thunderstorm forms, and let's look at the different types that there are.
So you can see the picture. These are kind of big, right? This is what would be considered an air mass thunderstorm. These are supercells, but there's still air mass, right? Where it's just kind of one, right? Uh, the video I'm going to show later will show several together, so that's not necessarily an air mass. Um, but in this case, we could see an individual thunderstorm in a particular area. These are a little bit unique, uh, for the most part. Normal thunderstorms that are air mass, like the ones we get in Palm Springs, uh, or Mount Baldy, uh, last for about an hour or so. Big Bear also another place that gets thunderstorms. Uh, so for the most part, once they start raining and, uh, becomes a thunderstorm, they usually last about an hour, hour and a half, is pretty typical, right? Uh, supercell, of course, is what you're looking at on the right-hand side. So these are just huge, and most of the time, these, you'll have like an air mass or you can have two air mass thunderstorms that start to grow, and then they combine, and then they start rotating. So this could be a combination of more than one thunderstorm that has kind of joined forces together to create this massive storm, which is crazy. So for sure, these things are going to last at least two hours. Um, and I'll show you this video and you see how big these things really are. Uh, so there is a definition of a severe thunderstorm. You will not see like severe thunderstorm in the weather. So when you see a METAR or terminal air forecast, that kind of stuff, you might see thunderstorm, but it won't list a thunderstorm ever as being light or heavy. Thunderstorms are just nasty, right? Now, we know as studying this, that there are different types, and some are worse than others, but they're all bad when it comes to aviation. So that's why in aviation, they don't differentiate. They just say thunderstorm, and that should be enough to keep you away from it. But the definition of a severe thunderstorm, right, is gusts that get over for 50 knots, which is that's pretty gnarly stuff, hail that's over 3/4 of an inch. And you think, oh, well, that's, you know, it's only so big, that's not too bad. So just remember when hail forms, right? You have precipitation that's inside the thunderstorm. It starts to go up. It will eventually reach the freezing level as it continues to travel up. So some of that water, or those supercooled water droplets, because they haven't frozen yet, but they continue to travel upwards in colder air, right? They'll start, they'll start to freeze. And as they're starting to freeze, they'll hit like other supercooled water droplets, and then eventually they get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then eventually they get to that, like an example of 3/4 of an inch. You think, okay, that's not, still, it's like 3/4 of an inch, how bad could that be, right? Well, take a three-quarter inch, that's about the size of a marble. Now, drop a marble on top of your head from 36,000 feet, it's probably going to hurt, right? So that's why it's important when you see some of these really big thunderstorms, you don't want to be in that hail, uh, when it comes out the backside. In the case of these big, you know, mesocyclone style, uh, supercells, you know, they can start spitting hail all all over the place. So it's careful. Uh, also with these bigger, larger cells like these supercells, you can get tornadoes. We'll kind of show you a video that shows them trying to form, doesn't actually form a tornado. Uh, we'll show you a picture of that afterwards, but, uh, you, but you can see the action of, you know, the turning on the outside of the thunderstorm as you look below it, you can see them, it wants to create a tornado, but it never happens, right? So here's a supercell, of course, that applies to all that nasty, you know, 50 gust, 50 knot gust and stuff like that would be associated with this type of cell. Uh, the lower half, the one in Kansas looks similar to the video I'm going to show you here in a sec, about how a thunder, you can actually see the inflow and the outflow of the thunderstorm. It's kind of neat. Um, but, uh, some of the things that you get with a supercell like this one, uh, those horizontal winds. So you'll see at the bottom part of this thunderstorm, you see these like shelf clouds come out, and if you see them in real time, like if you watch Monsters Monsoon videos and stuff, you can see shelf clouds just kind of shoot out from the thunderstorm. Those are the horizontals, and it's, it's pretty gnarly stuff. Um, and then you have large hail, of course, which we talked about, that 3/4 inch, it can get bigger, which is pretty gnarly, and then, of course, tornadoes.
Uh, let's see. Great Plains. The only reason why I put the Great Plains is because we typically don't get these type of, of cells, uh, in Southern California because we have mountains, and the mountains keep it from doing this rotation. So let's say these thunderstorms come in, and, uh, like we got recently, right? So the thunderstorms kind of blaze into Southern California, but because there's mountains, it keeps them from rotating and getting like massive like these things. So if you're in, you know, uh, Colorado or Kansas, and a lot of places in the Midwest where it's flat, it doesn't matter about the elevation, but it just needs to kind of be flat so it allows it to kind of do its thing. They get really, really big. Um, the Miso that you'll see on the chart stands for mesocyclone, so that, that's the rotational force, uh, that's kind of making it spin around, which is caused by the Coriolis effect, right? And then overshooting tops, those are the ones that kind of blast up potentially up to like 60,000 feet. Uh, wall clouds, you can see, I mean, just look at it, you can see the wall on that cloud, right? Don't go into that, that's really bad. And then the bulges, this is important because you will see this on the test, is the certain types of clouds which are rare on the bottom part called mammatus clouds. Mammatus clouds, they look like little, like if you were trying to push a basketball down, uh, below the clouds, and they're, they're pretty neat looking. Uh, let's see.
So, uh, the question is, is, uh, what if you're caught in hail? Um, so essentially, there's, there's a couple, I can answer this a couple different ways. If you're stuck in hail, there's nothing you do about it, you know, it's just hail, right? So it's very loud when you hit hail. I mean, it's like, can be gnarly loud, like you want to put like earplugs in if you don't have anything on, uh, because it can get very loud, especially since you're flying. If, depending on what you're flying, you could be going pretty quick. Um, it will dent the plane for the most part, but if you're flying fast enough, usually it's just the leading edges, and so the damage isn't as bad. But I will actually show you a picture of what happens when you fly through thunderstorms, cracking windshields and stuff. So what you do is you maintain your being straight and level, to for the most part, right? So you check your attitude whenever you're flying through, not only hail, but let's say you fly accidentally through a thunderstorm. How could you face that? Because sometimes when you're flying those thunderstorms, you could be flying in the clouds, like IFR, right? So you're under an instrument flight rule, you're flying in the clouds, you can't see them, right? So unless you have radar that shows you where they are, um, I'll show you another way to to recognize them through what they're called strike finders. But let's say you can't see it and you accidentally fly into a thunderstorm, what do you do? Well, you slow the aircraft down. Now, some of you that are flying have heard of maneuvering speed, and maneuvering speed is that speed in which you slow the aircraft down, and you can kind of throw that airplane all over the place, and you won't hurt it. You won't exceed its load factor, uh, abilities. So in other words, you won't dent or break something on the airplane at that particular speed or below. So in an airplane, essentially what will happen is the airplane will aerodynamically stall prior to anything happening to the airframe. So all you have to do as a pilot, um, is just kind of keep it level. You don't try to keep a certain altitude, right? Because just like I usually use whitewater as an example, whenever you're playing in the surf, and let's say a particularly heavy, like, you know, wave comes over the top and slams you down. Now you're stuck in the whitewater, and you're like, oh my God, right? If you try to fight the whitewater, you're not going to win, right? It's just going to toss you around like a rag doll. There's nothing you can do about it. But if you wait for the whitewater to chill, you can now come up to the surface, catch a breath, and hopefully you won't get whacked by another wave, right? Same thing when you're flying through really crappy conditions like a thunderstorm or severe turbulence, you just want to keep the wings level. That's it. You slow the airplane down, keep the wings level, continue on your path because the whole idea is to get through it, whatever it is, if it's a thunderstorm or just crappy turbulence, you want to get through to the other side or away from the turbulence quickly as possible. The best way to do that is continuing to go straight. If you turn, this is, I talk about this in aerodynamics, you increase the load factor on the wings when you actually try to make a 180 degree turn. It's actually safer to go straight forward at a slower.
air speed to protect the aircraft. So hopefully that answers your question. Um, I recommend, of course, don't flying thunderstorms, so you don't have to use the technique, right?
So, uh, I did it once, uh, not on purpose, but it was in between two cells in a 421 descending into Kansas. So as we were descending, the only way I could get out of it was splitting between. There's nowhere else for me to go. I had to go between these two thunderstorms, and it was probably one of the scarier flights I've ever had because I could not. Turbulence was so bad, I couldn't see. I couldn't see the instruments. It was bouncing around so much. It's kind of like trying to run and, and focus on something, um, you know, where it's just, it just becomes a blur. And so all you'd have to wait for is that little small period of time where, you know, all that turbulence stops for just a moment, and then it continues on after. But it's just in that moment, you immediately level the wings and just keep going forward, making sure your air speed's not too high, that kind of stuff. So it's not fun or comfortable if something like this happens, but you can get through it. You just need to be smart about it.
So here's an example of a supercell. It's going to be in a timelapse. So when you look at this, you'll see a grass fire that's on the leeward side. And this grass fire is, it's, it's not necessarily feeding the thunderstorm, but what it is, is the smoke from the grass fire is being drawn up into the thunderstorm. So for us, the cool thing is now we can see the air actually going into the thunderstorm, like how does that work? You can actually see it, which is kind of neat. And if you look on the, on the right-hand side of the, of that thunderstorm, you'll see where the rain, of course, is coming out. It is a supercell, similar to that picture of the Kansas one. Uh, I don't know, it might even be the same thunderstorm that's in this video. But this cool video, so take a look at it. Some of it doesn't have any sound, so it's, it's not the video, um, but when you do hear the sound, it's pretty wild. So as it starts to rotate, you'll see as far as like tornadoes, you'll see them kind of peek out, uh, from the bottom half as it's, as it's, you can see all the, the turbulence and the rotation as it goes around. All you could see a shelf cloud trying to push its way out from the very bottom of it. And here's where you're going to see it, little tornadoes. They're not tornadoes yet, you won't see those, but you can see the rotation at the bottom. See how it's kind of, see how it's whipping around? [Music] It's like, look behind you and there's more. Yeah. So there you have it. It's, uh, those things are huge and, uh, some pretty nasty stuff can come out of the bottom. And of course, I wanted to kind of make that impression upon you that, uh, flying underneath a thunderstorm is not a good idea because you can see potentially what can happen if you fly underneath it. You can get caught in one of those things, and that's just, that's not good.
Tornadoes. So these are bad, right? So we all know from, you know, Toto and cows flying through the air and stuff like that, that these just aren't very good. So it is a funnel cloud that comes out of the bottom. We kind of saw one form, and that's quite possible. There was at the very last part of that video, it was an actual tornado. Except they don't always look like this beautiful picture of a, of a tornado. Sometimes they're more kind of ambiguous where it's, it's happening. So a tornado, it, it, it doesn't become a tornado until, of course, it hits the ground. You can see all the dirt being pulled up by, by it, um, so it can be just a funnel cloud until it touches. Um, this was kind of self-explanatory as being violent, right? Uh, they don't last very long for the most part because as you saw, as that big huge, you know, thunderstorm, that supercell is rotating around, you know, when it creates that twisting motion and the tornado comes down, don't forget it's, it's rotating around, but don't forget that the thunderstorm is still rotating. So that tornado most likely won't last because there'll be a shear moment and it'll just kind of disappear. But it can also reform. So you can have one come down, disappear, another one come down. You know, it's crazy. That's so I'd rather take an earthquake over one of these things anytime.
Um, Fujita scale. So, uh, between one and five, five being the worst, uh, which is, uh, not good. Uh, we don't get these, uh, in Southern California. Uh, that's not an absolute necessarily because we actually did get one that I can remember in my lifetime that happened, I don't know, 10 or so years ago. There was an actual tornado that touched down, I think it was like Garden Grove. And of all the things that it hit, it hit a, a mobile home park, which is crazy. I mean, sometimes you see like the aftermath of a lot of these tornadoes in the Midwest, usually like wipe out all the mobile home parks. So, uh, that was just kind of funny and sad at the same time that's what it chose to touch down in Southern California. Uh, luckily, I don't think anybody was hurt, uh, severely when that happened. But in Southern California, we do get, which is really interesting. So if you have thunderstorms coming in, if you live down by the beach, maybe keep an eye out over the ocean because we can get waterspouts, which is just a tornado, but over the water. So in other words, when it comes down, you can see the water starting to spray off to the side. Does the exact same thing. It's just called a waterspout instead of a tornado. And, uh, yeah, it's pretty crazy when, uh, when tornadoes or anything comes out of the bottom of these big thunderstorms. So thunderstorms in Southern California are usually, if we get them, they're usually pretty good. And so just be careful. The, if you want, you know, if you like more thunderstorms, you just can't get enough of thunderstorms. There's, I have the monster tornado compilation, biggest tornadoes on Earth. Look that one up on YouTube. It's crazy how some of these things are. Anyway, I'm not going to show stuff like that on the, on, on this. You can look that up later. Kind of, kind of crazy.
So we have hail. So we talked a little bit about hail. Usually comes out of the top of the, the shelf that comes out the back, uh, of the, the thunderstorm itself, or the, the anvil, which typically what they call it. Uh, as, and we talked, talked about what it is. I put hang time to help you remember. Uh, it's just moisture that hangs out in that thunderstorm for a long enough period of time for it to kind of combine together to form hail that's large enough to actually drop out through gravity out of the back of the thunderstorm. So when you do get it, it's pretty wild. I know a lot, lot of us have seen it. Sometimes, you know, if it happens in Southern California, it looks like it's snowed, which is crazy. Uh, but it's kind of neat. Uh, but don't, don't drive around. You, you'll probably be okay because you guys are awesome. But, you know, other people driving around on the street where, when it hails, don't forget it's like it's ice, right? So, you know, your car might not handle so well. Uh, other things you can do, of course, is damage the aircraft. You can see in this aircraft, you can see the nose cone has been completely demolished. And, uh, you can't really see it, uh, but if you look at the Nelle, uh, that goes around the inlet of that engine, that's made of titanium. And so in that case, it's probably in pretty good shape. Same with the leading edges that contain the slats that come out to give it additional lift and of course aids in, uh, melting off all the ice that could potentially build up in icing conditions on the leading edge of the airfoil. But you can see it kind of beats it up quite a bit. Uh, they got the two windshields that just got pounded. And, uh, unfortunately, they'll have to replace those windshields. Kind of no-brainer, right? Uh, it doesn't really affect the plane itself, itself, because there's multiple layers in the windshield. Uh, so once the first one breaks, essentially protects the rest of them, because of course, it, it doesn't go anywhere for the most part, just kind of hangs out. So, will go ahead and remove that windshield. It's pretty simple process. It's just annoying to the maintenance guys because it's just one more thing that they have to do.
Uh, of course, we all know when we're flying in clouds, we have an instrument rating. In the case of airlines, you'll be an ATP, uh, which includes, of course, your instrument rating, and you use your instruments to land the aircraft. And at the very end, you might peek out the side window to make sure that you have a nice smooth landing for everybody. Uh, otherwise, you just kind of grin and be, you know, close your eyes and hope you don't slam it in too hard.
So moving on from hail, uh, we'll go ahead and look at lightning, which is all, you know, another feature of a thunderstorm. We can see four different types of lightning. In-cloud, which is really beautiful when you're flying around it, uh, and it just lights the whole thunderstorm up. You have cloud to cloud. So as you get towering cumulus that are next to the thunderstorm, you can get an interaction between the two because of friction. You'll see them kind of reach out and touch each other, which is kind of cool. Cloud to ground, which is what we're most familiar with, is, you know, being able to see lightning come down. This is kind of a cool shot because it's hitting that tree, lights that thing up. And then, of course, we have cloud to clear air, which is kind of the right side of that photo, uh, which shows the lightning just kind of going off, not really hitting anything necessarily, um, but it's an electrical discharge that comes out of the, uh, the, the thunderstorm itself. A lot of it has to do with friction. And, uh, those are all different types of clouds, or I'm sorry, lightning that you can have. And then here's that temperature I was telling you about earlier, which is that big temp difference. When a lightning strikes, that is where that thunder comes from. It's because that huge temperature differential as it's blasting through. So you can see that it can go upwards to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is insane. So that is a lot of heat. Luckily, it doesn't happen for very long, um, which is just kind of nuts if you think about it. So, uh, anyway, uh, you will see later on when they talk about, uh, lightning, uh, you'll see a lot of like cloud to ground and, uh, in-cloud, cloud and cloud, uh, described on like METARs and TAFs or forecast, mainly METARs to give you an idea of what's out there.
All right, um, let's see. What is it? So this is a better. Where is it? There we go. And it just kind of shows you the process of how lightning actually works. Uh, so it comes out, you can see positive and negative, so they just click together and, uh, form where the bolt actually eventually lands. Uh, so make sure that you're not walking across a field with an umbrella in your hand and be that guy where the lightning bolt strikes. You want to stay away from that, uh, because now that we know how gnarly they can get, try and, uh, steer clear, uh, of, of all the lightning. Uh, step leader is just describing what that piece is down at the bottom as it starts. It's kind of funny. They, they, you don't see it, but one comes down and another one kind of comes up. So they meet each other, the positive and negative, which creates the actual bolt, which is pretty interesting. There's another. Where is it? There we go. And then, of course, the return stroke. So, uh, all those put all together is what the lightning is formed with. And, uh, and so now you can use that and a party. Well, I know how lightning works, so it's kind of neat.
So we talked about thunderstorms. We talked about some of the kind of gnarly stuff that's in them. And now we'll look at thunderstorms when they decide to join hands and walk across the country. So it's called a squall line when you get numerous thunderstorms built up with each other or next to each other. There's a picture I took out of the, out of, you know, one of the trips that I was taking, uh, where it shows an actual squall line. Uh, it's kind of neat to be able to see that. You'll see all the anvils coming off the back end. Remember that's typically, not always, but typically where you would see, uh, the hail come out. It can come out of the thunderstorm itself, but most of the time it comes out of the anvil. Uh, it's not associated when. So when you see the test, uh, uh, from the FAA, they'll say this, that it's not always associated with a front. So that's what you have to remember. Is it typically? No, it's usually associated because it's two different air masses that are created friction between each other, and you usually end up with something nasty like this. Uh, this could also be a dry line that creates this kind of stuff. So a dry line is just where you have dry air and a lot of moist air, and they compete against each other, and they create some pretty severe weather. So multi-cell, multi-layer, or multi-cell thunderstorms, uh, link together. They usually move fairly quickly, 30 plus knots, as they start to continue going from the west to the east. And, uh, pretty, pretty crazy if you ever get the opportunity to kind of be underneath one of these when it crosses over, it's wild. So you, you get that gust, that that cool gust coming from the thunderstorm that's actually showed in this picture. So those little arrows pointing at it, the little green areas, uh, that's the gust front that that kind of precedes. So you'll feel that cold air, and as you feel the cold air, you feel the breeze, and sometimes it could be really strong, like really windy. And then you know that the bad stuff is coming because usually you can see it. Got all the lightning and thunder and stuff. So that happened as I was hanging out of a wind cat, or a White Castle hamburger place. You know, I was like, what's all that noise? And like, it was one of these. And it kind of sounds like a freight train when it's coming at you. It's really crazy. So that's a squall line.
Other places that you can get, uh, you know, pretty bad thunderstorms is during monsoon season. Uh, we're kind of moving out of monsoon season, but typically, you know, it was that that area from down and over Mexico, that air mass starts to move forward, or not forward, but kind of northbound, and as you can see, uh, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, uh, those areas in the United States, it essentially becomes like a low pressure area and it pulls all that moisture up from the Gulf, Gulf of California, and, uh, it, and it shoves it up into the United States, and that's where we get some of these kind of pretty big thunderstorms. So it is seasonal. It does eventually go away, um, but it's important for you to, to know when that happens, especially when you start flying, uh, so you can anticipate this kind of stuff as you fly across the country, which is kind of fun.
So how do we detect thunderstorms when we're flying in an aircraft, right? So this is one of the shots of, uh, one of the ways that we can see stuff. So you have a radar in the airplane. Hopefully, it's not knocked out like with the hail like it was on that Bo, um, but in this case, we have a working radar, which is great. You see the aircraft down at the very bottom, shaped as a triangle, as it continues on its arrival path, which is that purple or magenta line, which eventually kind of peels off to the right and goes straight, which if you're flying, that would be the downwind for the jet, and then eventually it comes around on its left downwind and enters the airport by those little three stars. It will start to fly in towards those stars and then land at the airport. But as you're flying along, you, you go ahead and you take a look at your radar, and radar stands for radio detection ranging, and it gives you all this information via different colors. So one of the things you want to be able to do is see, well, if what I'm flying in, uh, is is green, yellow, or red, or there's actually other colors that are that are even more nasty, such as like a magenta color, um, but in this case, if you fly into the green portions of what this radar is showing, the way you remember it is green will wash the plane off, right? So that's a good thing, nice shiny plane when you land, which is great. Yellow will wash the bugs off, right? So typically flying through the Midwest, you can get bugs in your airplane, wash those off, which is great. A little bit more force, and then of course, we have red, and red will wash the wings off. So don't fly in the red. It's very important to remember.
So, uh, how the radar works, essentially, is it sends out a pulse, and then it hits an object, and then it comes back, and we'll show you a little bit more about that here in a second, and then it gives you this display. So the transmitter of the radar energy that goes out from the airplane, and then receiving, it's all done in the same place, and to give you that display, which is great. The other thing, uh, that you'll be able to see when you look at radar is, or in this particular case on this multifunction display, is you'll see the direction of the winds. And if you look at the upper left-hand side, you'll see the, well, you see ground speed, true air speed, and right below it, you'll actually see the direction the winds are coming from and the speed in which those winds are are traveling. So you superimpose that on top of this and you compare it to where your airplane is, and you can get an idea that storm is actually coming towards you, right? So you want to keep that in mind, of course, when you're landing in this case, Philadelphia, and, uh, because you don't want to fly in that red area. So as we know that that storm's going to continue to move off to our right, we'll keep an eye on that as we're flying. We can avoid that red all together and go ahead and land and wash the plane off as we get there, which is nice. But of course, all those different colors are cons, are what they call that, the colors are called the echo, whatever you receive back.
All right, a little bit more about radar. We also have Doppler radar. Doppler radar is a little bit different from a lot of the kind of the, the regular radar that we had, kind of the old school stuff, and then the digital stuff we have today. Um, Doppler radar works on a different, it's a different, uh, different type of radar where it does more pulsing versus like a, a just throwing energy out, waiting for it to come back. Doppler does a pulse, and when it pulses out, uh, the nice thing is, is it eliminates, uh, some of the errors that are inherent with, uh, radar, which we'll, I'll show you in a sec. Um, but the nice thing is when it comes back, these, this is a shot of the lower picture. You see the big ball, right? And so that big ball, of course, is, it's called an RD88, and it's what we have in the local mountains. If you're local, uh, you can look up towards Saddleback Mountain, you could see like this, this golf ball. Uh, if you fly from John Wayne to Corona, you'll pass right by it. And, uh, that is where most of our local weather stations get their radar that they show on TV. It's all part of the NEXRAD system. So all these different, the RD, or the, the R88, and then you'll see terminals, uh, consist of the entire system itself. Um, when we look at our weather apps, I think I've shown them before, this is the precipitation and stuff that you see. You can see from the website, the AWC website above, when you look at the radar composite, this is what you'll see when you look it up. So there's 164 of those bad boys all over the country, in addition to 40 terminals.
So later on in the semester, I'm going to bring up a story that's kind of sad, but kind of not. So it's double-edged, but we learned a lot from this accident. Yeah, some bad things happen, some people passed away, but we got this. So the terminal radar one is Doppler, plus we also got these terminal radar sites. The advantage of the terminal radar sites for us, uh, when we talk about wind shear, that's what these do really well. So they can not only see the same stuff as the, the bigger ones, but they actually can put out more energy to differentiate wind differences, which is really amazing. They just can't push out, as you know, distance-wise like these bigger ones can. But either way, it works out well. Uh, an airborne weather radar, you remember that nose cone that was smashed in from the hail? That's what, what's behind it. So hopefully it didn't injure the, the radar dish. Quite possibly did, but if it didn't, um, this is what kind of like a Doppler or a, uh, a digital system looks like. It's a flat plate. The old school ones were kind of a conical shape, um, but the nice thing about this is, they're very powerful, uh, to a certain limit. Um, most of those, I think you can extend them out to like 240 miles, um, but most of the time when you're flying in an airplane, you're going to look between 40 and 80 miles, is kind of your, your zone that you're looking at because that's where you'll be flying. Um, of course, it's not as powerful, makes sense, right? It's not as big and powerful as some of the ground stuff. And the drawback to airborne weather radar is you can get, um, attenuation. So attenuation, quite simply, is you got a bunch of energy coming out of that radar, it hits something, let's say something big, right? And then all that energy bounces back. Well, if all the energy bounces back, you can't see what's behind what it just bounced off of. So if you look at this picture down below, you can see the course line going straight through it. You see the radar went straight ahead and it hit that huge thunderstorm, and when it hit that thunderstorm, it bounced straight back to the aircraft, and unfortunately, we can't see because of that, there wasn't any energy that went past that thunderstorm and then came back. So we, we can't see behind that thunderstorm, and that's what the attenuation is, is it that blank black airspace that's behind it. You can't tell if there's any, there could be something there. The only reason why you say you, you would anticipate there might be, is if you look just to the right, right on the front lines, you can see two thunderstorms, right? The one that attenuated, then one off just to the right, but then there's a gap in between those two thunderheads. And then right between them, you can see some of that energy from that radar went through that gap, hit another thunderstorm that's far off and bounced back. Well, because of attenuation, there actually could be another thunderstorm behind in that black area. There could be one there, but you don't know. And because you don't know, of course, as a pilot, we're always going to make sure we fly to fly another day. We're going to go left and go around this whole line completely, and so we don't have to worry about it. And then when we start to come around the edge, we'll be able to see whether or not there's anything behind it.
Alternatives to radar itself, if you don't have a radar system, you might have something like this, which is lightning detection. Uh, there's a couple different manufacturers here shown, BF Goodrich and, and, uh, Insight makes this thing called Strike Finder. Very handy, uh, if you don't have radar to be able to see where the cells are. And all those little dots represent lightning strikes. So, uh, there's two, there's a couple different ways that software looks at it. You can have it form as cells. So in other words, it looks like all, it looks at all the lightning strikes and then it goes, well, most of them are here, right? And that's where you'll see the cells located. You'll see that at the top, and then the lower left, on the lower right, you'll see just the individual strikes. And in this particular case, as you fly towards the thunderstorm, right, it'll just keep showing strikes. You can clear it, see the little clear button down at the bottom, because sometimes it can kind of like, where is it? So you clear it, and then the strikes will start to, uh, to show up again. So a couple different ways to look at it. So this is, this is pretty handy. Uh, and of course, this, the whole idea is not fly in thunderstorms or close to thunderstorms. It's to avoid completely the thunderstorm. So wherever it is, remember you're 20 miles, and, uh, and as you can see in the lower left, where it actually, you can put a ring, see that ring that's around the, uh, the airplane is says 25 on it. So that's a 25 nautical mile ring around your airplane. So you don't want anything that's out there to get into that ring. So you want to stay away. That gives you a little better idea of what you're looking for.
Uh, other things you can do while you're flying a plane across the Midwest, as you can read the coast report. It's probably one of the most riveting newspapers I've ever read in my whole life, and you can do that while you're flying an autopilot and a commander. So something to look forward to in life, right? So this worked out really well, of course, until I blew a cylinder and had to land at Liberal, Kansas, which was kind of a bummer, but I finished the flight eventually when they fixed the plane. Um, but when I took off and continued the flight, uh, which was a few days later, um, this was one of the things that I saw, which is kind of neat. This illustrates that that beginning part, the cumulus phase, right? So in this case, thunderstorms didn't form here. They did later, which I'll show you what those look like, but in this case, we see that the cumulus starting to form in the morning. And in this particular case, let's see, it's a video. There you go. Uh, you can look around the aircraft. I'm flying above the cumulus clouds because I want a smoother ride. As long as you stay above the clouds, it's actually a pretty nice ride. If you go below the clouds, all that instability that's causing these clouds to form, that's that's where it's at. So in other words, if you go below them, it's going to be a bumpier ride, right? Anyway, so that was kind of fun being able to fly across there. Of course, this was one of my goals, checkpoints, right? Was, uh, Green Bay, and kind of hard to miss. I like those big checkpoints so you can't make mistakes. This, of course, is Green Bay. So if any Packers fans, this is the area that would be in. Was kind of neat as I continued my flight to deliver this plane. And when I crossed over this airport, I talked to the controllers and had a bet with them to see whether or not I would be able to beat a thunderstorm. And it wasn't this thunderstorm, as you can see how the sun was starting to go down, it was kind of starting to dissipate. I wasn't worried about this one. It was, uh, where is it? Here we go. It was this one. So this was right after I passed Green Bay, my airport straight in front of me, and they wanted to see whether or not I would actually be able to land the aircraft before the thunderstorm hit, which I did. And so I won that part of the bet, but in the end, of course, they won because when I was tying down the plane, I just got hammered with rain. So they're just probably laughing. But the neat thing is about this picture is you can see kind of a roll cloud. Uh, there's a shelf, then there's a roll cloud where just some really nasty turbulence is. We want to stay away from that, of course. But visualize where that's at. It's right off my left wing, right? So this, I had inside the aircraft, so I took a picture of this while I was flying. You can see the thunderstorm off to the left-hand side. It doesn't, of course, look as nice as being able to see it visually, but at least you can see all those lightning strikes that happen fairly quickly, right? And you can see the proximity to my aircraft.
All right, so of course, in this case, you want to try and land as soon as possible to get away from it so it doesn't go over the top, uh, as you're flying. So this is just an example of how to use that equipment while you're flying to avoid some of the nastier stuff. All right, there we go.
Uh, other things that you can use, use in order to get the information for thunderstorms is data link weather. Uh, you can get these, uh, you know, if, if you have the appropriate apps such as Garmin Pilot or, or ForeFlight, something that can receive ADS-B In is really important because one, if you have the ability to get ADS-B In, uh, you'll be able to see some of this weather and avoid it completely. So even though the information you see on these screens is not real time, super important for you to remember, this stuff is not real time. So you can't rely on it when you're flying really close to thunderstorms. You actually need real data that's real time, like through a radar. Um, but this helps you strategy-wise to be able to work your way around stuff, uh, both in the planning and when you're actually flying the plane, give yourself kind of a wide berth, which you can see as that jet was flying towards the, the north from Florida. Sirius, of course, is a, uh, a subscription that you can get. I've used their system before, it works out really well. You get similar kind of data. Now that we have ADS-B, all you need is the equipment to receive ADS-B In, and that could be anywhere from $100 to $600 to $800, depending on like what other kinds of things you want, uh, besides just weather and traffic. Um, so you can look that up on your own. Uh, it's really interesting stuff that you can get and very handy when you're flying across the country to be able to get this kind of information.
Uh, other things I can leave you with, of course, are little tips, right? So don't go there. I don't know how many times I could say that. Stay 20 miles away from it, which, you know, that's, that's close, right there. That's, you know, that's a nice safe distance, which is nice. Not exactly sure what kind of plane this is, but, uh, I don't know, it's got a lot of stuff on it, that's for sure. Maybe it's, I don't know, whether you're spraying the fields or something. Otherwise, that's it for the lecture on thunderstorms.