Visibility
sunrise: 5:01 am
sunset: 11:04 pm
As I crested the top of the bluff driving home from work last night, the view across the Inlet and to the north was veiled by a faint haze of smoke. The sun, still an hour or two from sunset, had dropped behind a band of stratus clouds, lending the land and sky subtle hues. The normally sharp contours of Mt. Redoubt, always spectacular when I turn the final bend on the highway, were softened and indistinct. The mountain cast an azure silhouette against the pale peach sky sixty miles away.
In more civilized areas, unrestricted visibility is considered, for aviation purposes, ten miles. That figure is meaningless in the clear air of the north. My daily commute to work (all ten-to-fifteen minutes of it) takes me along the bluff that defines the southwestern edge of the Kenai Peninsula. I can look out across lower Cook Inlet to the perfect snow-capped cindercone of Augustine Volcano, sixty miles to the southwest, with the jagged peaks of Cape Douglas rising up eighty miles to the south.
Years ago, when I worked in Fairbanks, we got a telephone call one clear autumn day from a Flight Service Station in Virginia. The specialist on the other end of the line thought there had been a typo in the last weather report we had transmitted. "In the Fairbanks sequence--your visibility is twelve miles, right?"
"Uh--no, actually, it's one hundred-twenty miles."
"A hundred and twenty miles?"
"Yep."
"What can you see that's a hundred and twenty miles away?"
"Well, there's this great big mountain to the southwest of us--twenty-thousand feet tall. We call it Denali but you probably know it as Mt. McKinley..."
*~*~*~*
"It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn't take any to just sit there with a dumb look on your face." --June motto on Demotivators 2002 calendar by www.despair.com
sunset: 11:04 pm
As I crested the top of the bluff driving home from work last night, the view across the Inlet and to the north was veiled by a faint haze of smoke. The sun, still an hour or two from sunset, had dropped behind a band of stratus clouds, lending the land and sky subtle hues. The normally sharp contours of Mt. Redoubt, always spectacular when I turn the final bend on the highway, were softened and indistinct. The mountain cast an azure silhouette against the pale peach sky sixty miles away.
In more civilized areas, unrestricted visibility is considered, for aviation purposes, ten miles. That figure is meaningless in the clear air of the north. My daily commute to work (all ten-to-fifteen minutes of it) takes me along the bluff that defines the southwestern edge of the Kenai Peninsula. I can look out across lower Cook Inlet to the perfect snow-capped cindercone of Augustine Volcano, sixty miles to the southwest, with the jagged peaks of Cape Douglas rising up eighty miles to the south.
Years ago, when I worked in Fairbanks, we got a telephone call one clear autumn day from a Flight Service Station in Virginia. The specialist on the other end of the line thought there had been a typo in the last weather report we had transmitted. "In the Fairbanks sequence--your visibility is twelve miles, right?"
"Uh--no, actually, it's one hundred-twenty miles."
"A hundred and twenty miles?"
"Yep."
"What can you see that's a hundred and twenty miles away?"
"Well, there's this great big mountain to the southwest of us--twenty-thousand feet tall. We call it Denali but you probably know it as Mt. McKinley..."
*~*~*~*
"It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn't take any to just sit there with a dumb look on your face." --June motto on Demotivators 2002 calendar by www.despair.com
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