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Years ago, during the No Fly period after 9/11, I was driving truck and felt that I could perceive a difference in our skies. I had a little mishap while fishing; I caught two trout and they caught one sucker. One jumped out the water and flipped my spinner back at me which hit me in the left eye. Fortunately I had a great eye surgeon and in a matter of months he had me back on the road again. But my left eye is always dilated and I had to wear polarized sunglasses when driving. That was the case after 9/11 and I was a long distance driver covering thousands of miles with a partner. Only with the polarized lenses did our skies look different and I gave them to my partner on several occasions to verify my observations.
OK; so lets move the hands of the clock ahead to now. There are still many planes in our skies as you can see on Flightaware: https://flightaware.com/live/. Of course many of those flights are air freight; but not all. While it seems like a lot of flights as you look at the whole Nation; it is only a fraction of the planes that flew before the Corona virus hit. I do not know if we have to have "0" flights before we can repeat the same observations I made with my polarized lenses in 2001? I don't even know where my old polarized glasses are anymore; I adapted to not using them for my dilated eye.
I would be interested if anybody is using this unique opportunity to study our weather and see if the lack of planes is making any difference? Hopefully there are better instruments studying this than an old pair of polarized, 'fishing', sunglasses.
That is one of the reasons that I made this post. Every morning I look at the skies to my east, towards NYC, and on 'normal mornings' with fair weather I could count many contrails. Now I see just a few.
That Flightaware link shows just how many or how few planes we have in our air currently. It looks like a lot if you look at the whole Nation at one time. But, when you zoom in as close as it will let you, there are not that many. It isn't only that; but some of the busiest airports, that we had, now have very few planes taking off or landing.
So I am thinking that this could provide another 'unique' opportunity, for those interested, to study what planes do or don't do to skies. Hopefully the medical professionals will find a cure and we can go back to business as usual; but it looks like that could be a long ways away.
Yeah, the planes disappeared over a month ago now and it's nice to have nicer skies and less noise over our heads.
It wasn't just aircraft. The great decrease in vehicles driving, manufacturing, and many other modern vocations that release chemicals, soot, water vapor and particulates of all kinds, also contributed to the very different "normal" weather.
While the biggest and obvious change was no more high cloud cover, that spread out and ended up creating a haze by evening, the decrease in all clouds, and rain, was very obvious.
Even when a contrail isn't visible, (ice crystals from aircraft exhaust), they diffuse incoming sunlight, and cool the planet. The added water in the very dry stratosphere also alters the energy balance of the planet. Especially over the North Pole. And climate experts don't actually know by how much.
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