Tuesday, November 2, struck residents of Central Russia with unusual weather. Throughout the day, the region was in dense fog. Apparently, nature, imbued with the mood of the recent Halloween, also decided to pick up some scary costumes and tried on a set from the Canadian horror film “Silent Hill”. The movie is about a small town covered in fog and inhabited by monsters.
The consequences of the Moscow blizzard, however, were no less serious than the encounter with the monsters of a small American town. The reduced visibility led to traffic jams. And not only on the roads, but also on the runway at the airport in Nizhny Novgorod.
Due to fog, several planes could not land in the capital. So they were diverted to the nearest fog-free airport, Strigino, which is located in Nizhny Novgorod. A large number of arriving airliners formed a traffic jam right on the landing strip. According to BFM.ru, thirty-three flights were diverted from Moscow to Strigino.
Some passengers had to spend more than nine hours in an airplane traffic jam. People had no food and no water, and some were late for connecting flights. Posts of indignant air passengers appeared on social media.
A child on one of the airliners of the airline “Pobeda” became ill. Doctors who arrived had to use oxygen cylinders to keep him alive.
RBK reported, citing Hydrometeorological Center chief scientist Roman Wilfand, that such a fog is called a radiation fog. This phenomenon has nothing to do with radiation.
“Its essence is that when there is little cloudy sky at night, there is intense cooling of the underlying surface due to the release of long-wave radiation. The underlying surface cools significantly, and the surface air layer also cools. Yesterday the temperature was higher, this coincided with the absence of cloud cover. And cloudiness emits counter longwave radiation, there is no cooling of the underlying surface“, – said Wilfand.
By 10 a.m. on November 3 all planes had left Nizhny Novgorod’s Strigino and departed for their destinations.
