Freesteel Blog » Thermal temperature shadows

Thermal temperature shadows

Tuesday, June 9th, 2015 at 11:09 am Written by:

I got a bit depressed with my performance when I look at the GPS track and noticed that I’d inexplicably missed out a complete turn when I was flying. This track is going from west to east downwind.

With the power of pyclick() I could plot locations on the GPS against a graph of the barometer values, so the positions of the red vertical pointers correspond to the vertical yellow lines on the barometer graph (in red):

So that explains it. The vario stopped climbing (air pressure ceased declining with altitude) briefly, and I flew downwind briefly to pick it up again.

So that’s not so bad then. I need more confidence that I’m doing it right in a thermal, because I can’t tell the difference between doing badly on an easy thermal and doing well on a difficult one.

Here’s the snipped from the flight video with the positions marked.

The a second curve in the graph above, the one in cyan that wiggles up and down, is the graph of air temperature according to a dallas one wire probe that reads every 0.75seconds. My other temperature devices are generating noise, and the infrared wing thermometer got lost when I broke an upright on Wether Fell.

Let’s look at a similar graph from later on in the flight where I did well and got to cloud-base.

The temperature graph is here, declining smoothly without any changes in direction with each turn. (The really wiggly line is the airspeed, which I’ve not worked out how to process yet, although I believe there is a correlation between sudden changes in speed and variations in altitude regarding the trade between speed and height.)

So what’s going on here? Am I dropping in and out of the first thermal with every turn, but managing to remain entirely within the updraft on the second?

Or does the sensor box on the left of the base bar enter and exit the shadow of the wing with every turn in the first thermal, and this doesn’t happen when I’m higher up in the shadow of the cloud?

That seems like a better explanation.

Recommendation: Always point a video camera at your experimental sensor instrumentation so you can get to the truth of any interesting effects that it might be picking up. It could be the sunlight, people walking past, a visiting cat, or other devices switching on or off in the vicinity.

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