Ground School - Meteorology

The scheduling was tight but I made it to class and back. Today's class was about something I used to find a bit boring: weather. It's a topic with a fairly simply theory, but remembering what does what and why is a bit complicated. For example, nearly everything comes back to the fact that high-pressure areas are usually cool and dry while low-pressure areas are warm and wet. When a high pressure area moves into a low, the warm air cools down, meeting the dew-point and you get rain (or any other of various precipitation). Where it gets complicated is in things like in the day the ground is warm and the air moves up while in the night things are a bit more stable because of inversion and water warms and cools slower than the land so at night the cool air comes in off the ocean making fog, but only if blah blah. Anyways, it's something I'd really like to learn well so one day I can look out the window and say, for example, that there's going to be hail in two hours.

The most important thing I learned today was a new term for an airplane: windbuggy. Really, that's what it feels like in a small craft. I once described it as ridding a moped in the sky.

I got a ride to the bus loop from the instructor. He's an interesting man who's spent a lot of time in the Air Force. Hopefully I'll be seeing him again for Thursday's class.