Heart-felt wishes for the new year!!!
For the Christmas holidays, I went back home to enjoy the holidays and new year with my parents. My hometown is Bhubaneswar and I work in Bangalore. I decided to go home quite late and I must tell you that I had a real,real tough time getting tickets for travel. Anyway, I managed to get flight tickets on
Kingfisher airlines, for a break journey to Bhubaneswar via Hyderabad.
Flying in India is not as easy on the pocket as in the developed countries (I do not have exact data though.) If one has time and one can endure a long train journey, its probably wise to travel by train from Bangalore to Bhubaneswar. But I must warn you that when I say that the train journey is "long", its really "long" (about 28 hours). Indian readers might not find this unsettling, but such a long journey for some tourist from a developed country would surely not be alluring enough.
It was probably the fourth time I was flying. I had got the aisle seat though I would have surely liked a window seat. Anyway, everything went fine and the flight from Bangalore to Hyderabad soared beyond the clouds in no time. The guy at the window seat in my row dozed off quite soon. I was kinda sleepy too, when suddenly I gazed out of the window. I swear the sight was breath-taking. We were above some clouds and the morning light played on the upper layers of the clouds quite brilliantly. It was all clothed with a shade of orange, and the interplay of light and shadow among the clouds was amazing. I kept on looking at the sight outside and wondered if such a sight was banal enough for the guy dozing off next to me. Anyway, I reached Hyderabad in some time, and then I realized that the flight to Bhubaneswar was delayed due to fog.
In the afternoon, my flight for Bhubaneswar took off and I was really happy that I would be reaching home in a short time. I was reading a Poirot mystery and was looking outside at times to find the sun at its peak; but the light-shadow effect was not as great as in the morning. The flight crowd this time was a bit noisier.
Well, I was starting on my reading session when suddenly an idea occurred to me. Every seat on the flight has a small television screen attached, so that the passenger can watch some television channels and can get important flight-related information. One of the channels was giving information about the flight such as the height we were at, the speed at which we were flying and the outside temperature at the height, a map showing the course of the flight. etc. I thought it would be interesting to see how the outside temperature varied with the height above sea level. So I took out my pen and paper and jotted down the displayed data about outside temperature and height. Just out of curiosity, I have now plotted the data using
gnuplot.
Well, the data points do not look like fitting onto a well-known curve. The variation at altitudes closer to the ground level seems quite linear. Although I have fewer data points for the higher altitudes, the variation there looks to be approximately linear too. The only break in the "rough" linearity comes somewhere around 2250 metres. Though I am not quite sure, but my guess is that the clouds were present close to this altitude, which would mean that the upper layers of the clouds would have a higher temperature owing to the direct sunlight, while the area just below the clouds might be cooler. Just a guess though !!!
Some PhD in atmospheric sciences might derive more sense out of this. :)
