Tristan Gooley
speaker
256 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 13 Nov
Tristan Gooley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So if it was nighttime for 10 days solidly, things would start to equal out. But obviously, that's not what we experience. So everywhere the sun, at any one moment, the sun is rising somewhere and it's setting somewhere else. The sun is sort of setting this game going the whole time.
Every time things start to equalize a little bit, there'll be the sun heating up a bit of land more than the sea or heating up the low latitudes more than the high latitudes. So it's all driven by the sun. And because it's sunny somewhere always, the game never ends.
Dew and frost are related. And they're both a sign that we've had clear skies overnight, similar to we were talking about fog a little bit earlier. And it's a similar thing that if you have clear skies overnight, the heat leaves the land. I think everybody's comfortable with the idea that heat energy radiates from the sun to us.
But people are slightly less familiar with the way heat radiates out of everything, including us. You know, I'm looking at a desk and a chair. There's heat radiating out of those. I've got a cup of tea. There's heat radiating out of that. And heat radiates out of the land and it does it much, much more quickly and dramatically when there are clear skies.
So what we tend to find is if you've got the blanket, the stratus type cloud over an area at night, you wake up in the morning and there'll be no dew.
If the following night, those clouds have cleared away and you've got clear skies, the land gets very, very cold overnight, the moisture in the air, and there is always moisture in the air, even over the hottest deserts in the world, there's some moisture in the air. There's no such thing as
perfectly dry air on planet Earth, then that moisture comes into contact with the cold ground, it condenses and forms dew, and if it's cold enough, it will form frost. So frost is just frozen dew? Yeah, there are different types of frost, but the one most of us are familiar with, that's the exact process. It's dew forming at a cold enough temperature that it freezes on contact.
And one of the fun things we can do is, both dew and frost, is just notice how it disappears when you walk under any form of shelter. So whether it's a jutting bit of a roof or a tree or anything else that stops heat escaping. And you can probably start to sense how the pieces sort of come together here. We have a sun pocket we're warmer in because the heat can't escape vertically upwards.
But the flip side of that is if the heat can't escape vertically upwards, that bit of ground will stay warm overnight and you won't get dew or frost there. And I think, again, everybody's had that experience where you go out and you see a frosty landscape.
But if you just pause for two seconds, you go, I'm used to kind of seeing it, but I've never actually thought, why is it more frosty there than there? And why is there no frost there?
The other sort of real cornerstone is prevailing wind direction. So in most of the temperate parts of the world, it's a little bit different in the tropics, but in you know, most of the US and Europe, we find that the wind blows from one direction more often than any other. And that leaves footprints absolutely everywhere. So the tops of trees will reflect that direction.
So you can't predict what the wind's going to do from the prevailing wind direction. So the wind can blow from the north, south, east or west on any day of the year. But over the course of a year, there are patterns and they're fairly dependable. So if it In my part of the world, the wind blows from the southwest more than any other direction.
And that means I can look to the tops of trees and quite a few other places just to see that footprint. You just see the trees bent over from southwest to northeast. And wherever you are in the world, you just tune into what your local prevailing wind is.
Um, and if you, if you're not sure it's, you know, you can, however you want to do it, you can look it up on the internet or you can, um, just have a look at the tops of trees in a fairly exposed place, you know, go up a hill a little bit or something like that with practice.
You can see it in parks in the center of cities, but, but when you're starting out looking for that effect, you just want to look in places that are getting blown by the wind quite a lot because it's a much more dramatic effect. It's much easier to pick up.
Cheers, Mike. Really good chatting.
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