Vietoris hyperspaces of scattered Priestley spaces

We study Vietoris hyperspaces of closed and closed final sets of Priestley spaces. We are particularly interested in Skula topologies. A topological space is \emph{Skula} if its topology is generated by differences of open sets of another topology. A compact Skula space is scattered and moreover has a natural well-founded ordering compatible with the topology, namely, it is a Priestley space. One of our main objectives is investigating Vietoris hyperspaces of general Priestley spaces, addressing the question when their topologies are Skula and computing the associated ordinal ranks. We apply our results to scattered compact spaces based on certain almost disjoint families, in particular, Lusin families and ladder systems.Comment: Minor corrections, added some comments. Final version (30 pages