Lots going on with the IR (infra –red) satellite picture this morning
This image is from the European training resource
http://eumetrain.org/eport/euro_06.php?width=1366&height=768&date=2014050206®ion=euro
Make sure you refresh if you bookmark this page, or you could be looking at the image when you made the book mark. Mine always comes up with 28
th Oct 2013 which was St Jude’s’ storm and is a very distinctive picture, so I do notice.
A high is building over the UK as we head into the long weekend, a ridge of high pressure bringing more settled conditions. We are still under cool air from the north, and only slowly warmer air will spill in. Already you can see the bright white area in the west on the image. Cirrus is high cloud and cold. On an infra –red image it shows different shades of grey for the temperatures differences. So the sea is often black (warmish) fog doesn’t show up over land (no real temperature contrast). The cirrus shield is ahead of a warm front which will bring rain to N.Ireland and Scotland at the weekend. Often that is the first sign in the skies of changing weather, invading cirrus.
There is still an old front straddled across the UK, which is fading as the high builds. You can see the link of cloud from Denmark, dipping south in the North Sea and then over N.England. The Met Office synoptic chart shows this frontolysis (decaying front) and it moving southwestwards by midday. That process has begun with more brightness over northern England but Cumulus clouds are now building up and filling in the skies.
In the far North Sea is an area of low cloud. It has now lifted from haar (sea fret) and is a patchy blanket of Stratocumulus. It is breaking up too, but still has been creeping southwards in the northerly flow
Anywhere you see un-naturally straight lines on an IR picture; it would usually point to contrails. Airplanes coming across the Atlantic in this case. Conditions have to be favourable for them to form and last which is why you don’t see them everywhere.
Across in Europe there are some cracking thunderstorms (TS). By Genoa, in NW Italy you can see a bright white oval shape. That is the top of a Cumulonimbus cloud punching up through the atmosphere, a cold icy top
