Temperature inversion

Okay kiddo, picture yourself standing in your backyard on a cool and crisp day. You can feel the chilly air around you, and you know that the air gets warmer as you go up in the sky. Now, imagine if things were a bit different and the air near the ground was really warm, but as you went up, it got colder - this is called a temperature inversion.

Imagine a cake, but instead of being stacked with the largest layer at the bottom and the smallest layer at the top, it's stacked the other way around. That is how temperature inversion works. Normally, when you go higher up in the sky, the temperature drops, but when there is a temperature inversion it’s the opposite. The temperature rises as you go up from the ground.

Basically, temperature inversion happens when a layer of warm air gets trapped in the atmosphere and sits above a layer of cold air close to the ground. This can sometimes happen on clear nights where the heat that was stored in the earth during the day gets trapped close to the ground instead of escaping to the atmosphere.

The trapped layer can cause a lot of problems for us. For example, in big cities, pollution can get trapped by temperature inversion and cause smog which can be harmful to breathe in.

So, there you have it kiddo. A temperature inversion occurs when the air is warmer near the ground and cooler as you go up into the sky, which can cause pollution to get trapped near the ground.