Detecting temperature inversions

I am curious as to how difficult it would be to detect temperature inversions, also what type or amount of equipment is required to make this possible?

Regards
Matthew

Just two thermometers at different altitudes :slight_smile:

If you intend to detect this from a single location, maybe an infrared thermometer could help, eg if you have sight on the ground from a valley and the infrared sensor points to that ground, you can detect it. The best thing is to have two infrared thermometers pointing to the ground and measure the difference. Of course, this don’t work always if at the one location you have fog.

There are handheld infrared thermometers that you can use for that purpose. I’m using this one http://www.bitmax.es/product_info.php?cPath=67_70&products_id=277
that can tell you also cloud and fog temperatures. Of course, it is not automatic, but a very interesting toy.

We estimate the strength of the bandpass-integrated thermal emission from the extrasolar planet TrES-4 at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 micron using the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Try downloading the nearest radiosonde plot, and you can find the values there. There are some free programs about that can do that for you.

Best wishes

Mike

As Mike mentioned:

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/soundings/