U
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I'm a student pilot and this morning I went for a solo flight to the practice area. I fly out of a non-towered airport with no weather station, so I always set the altimeter to the airport elevation (122 feet) before takeoff. This time I managed to set it to 1122 feet without noticing. I believe that the last time this plane was flown was Wednesday and there was a big drop in seal level pressure since then so the the altimeter was already indicating close to 1000 feet when I got in. 1122 feet gave me an altimeter setting of 30.76 (I remember thinking this seemed really high) and the initial setting on the GPS (last one entered) was 30.46. Anyway I take off, have my head out the window for the first part of the takeoff, glance down and think "I must be getting some crazy climb rates right now cause I'm already at 2000. Everything seemed off though and it didn't look like 2000 feet. I climb to 3000 indicated and do some airwork. The whole time I had a feeling that something was wrong and the view didn't look right, but I shrugged it off figuring it must be because I haven't flown in two weeks. I make my way back and was going by the view out the window to try to stay in gliding distance of the airport, not really paying much attention to my altimeter. As I'm setting up for the 45, I begin descending and get the feeling that something is really wrong. I make it down to 1500 indicated while on the downwind and now I know for a fact that I'm wayyy to low when I'm indicating that I should be too high. I start to think that the barometric pressure might have dropped a lot since 30 min ago when I took off, but I really didn't think that was possible. I decide to climb and turn right out of the pattern, and it finally hits me what I must have done. I pull out my sectional and loop up the frequency for an ASOS 10 miles away, tune it in, and sure enough they're giving an altimeter setting about an inch lower than what I have set. I dial it in, enter the pattern on the 45 again, and land without incident. I'm definitely not making this mistake again, and I'm really glad it didn't happen at night where it might not be so obvious how low I am.