CLEAR skies for weeks have meant plenty of fun in the sun on the ground.

But high in the air it’s also offered a unique window for surveys of the landscapes across Clydebank and north-west Glasgow.

Mappers from the Ordnance Survey fly over 50,000sq km of Britain between March and November each year, taking images to identify new features for their maps.

That has given the OS a database of more than 500 million unique features, to which they make about 20,000 changes a day.

The blue skies of the past weeks has meant OS staff have already flown over 47,000sq km, putting them close to finishing their work months ahead of time.

Dry conditions have already revealed stone circles, former palace gardens and other buried features across the UK.

Jean Martin, OS operations production manager, said: “Both ourselves and our external imagery suppliers have been able to maximise these very unusual weather conditions over Great Britain in the past few months.

“The fact that we had wall-to-wall clear skies over all of GB for quite a lengthy time gave us many more opportunities to fly, especially capturing the ‘hard to get’ areas, such as the Borders region.

“Sunny days usually mean cumulus cloud bubbling up during the sorties just at the level where we wish to fly. Aiming for cloud-free imagery can mean careful planning with us going from Plan A to Plan Z very quickly.”