Just for fun!

The Latin students among you will readily recognize what sort of ideas are expressed by all these syllables, which are very clear and definite.

Upper level cirrus in various tangles with a large sheet of cumulus that still allows the light to come around and through.

Stratocumulus means a sheet of lumpy clouds. Stratus is sheet; cumulus is lumpy or humpy. Perlucidus means the light goes around it — the sheet does not cover the sky. In fact, convection in the center of the sheet makes it high there while the edges are not growing.

Above the cumulus — in the upper section of the photo, but also thousands of feet higher in the sky, the cirrus, the wispy clouds, are tangled in various ways. Having words for it makes it easier to remember what you saw and how it was laid out. Figuring what weather is implied is a different exercise, but The Weather Identification Handbook gives some basic clues.

Con calma y sin pausa, se va fabricando la tormenta en la inmensidad del llano cerealista. Grandes cumulus congestus y cumulonimbus calvus, de oscuras bases, se van creando y hacinando con una finalidad común, el espectáculo atmosférico, la tormenta…

[wp-cumulus]

Un cielo tormentoso amenazador, con profusión de bases nubosas procedentes de cúmulos y cumulonimbos, ocupa todo el horizonte. Repentinamente, en la lejanía, desciende una figura tubular desde una de estas bases planas; todo indica que se trata de un “landspout”, o lo que es lo mismo, un tornado no supercelular.

Un momento único para disfrutar relajadamente del filón inagotable del cielo, a pié de playa. Luz diáfana, y entramado maravillosamente tejido de Altocumulus stratiformis, acompañados a un nivel mas bajo por Cumulus fractus y Cumulus humilis.

Finalizando el dia, la convección en forma de Cumulus congestus y Cumulonimbus calvus, se incrementa, asemejándose a una enorme ebullición teñida de herrumbre por los últimos rayos del sol. Todo un espectáculo visual.

]]> http://mtrtest.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/cumulus-improving/ Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:46:07 +0000 Brian Harris http://mtrtest.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/cumulus-improving/ http://bellaitalianaphotography.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/hasta-luego-mexico/ Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:21:05 +0000 bellaitaliana http://bellaitalianaphotography.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/hasta-luego-mexico/

Well, I do believe that this is the last photo I’ll be posting from Mexico…time to move on (until it is the dark, cold, middle of winter and I find it imperative to post something warm and sunny).  This photo is a shot of Playa Norte’s crystal clear water at sunset (hence the yummy pink cast on the sand!).  Playa Norte on Isla Mujeres, Mexico is such a gorgeous place–truly what comes to my mind when I picture a tropical paradise.  I hope you have enjoyed traveling to Mexico with me through my photos.  Stay tuned!

Why, of course it was taken with the Canon Powershot G7.  Contrast was fixed using Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Time to buy a proper camera – despite my five megapixel LG Viewty being really handy for getting decent snaps when out and about, it doesn’t really cut it when the light is fading. I’m looking for help identifying two rather different things – clouds and mushrooms.

I took the picture of the clouds in Galway last Friday just before dusk.  I have no idea what type of cloud it is, and the fine folks at the Cloud Appreciation Society seem unsure too. It appears to have the wispyness of a cirrus and the bulk of a cumulus, but nothing in my Cloudspotter’s Guide resembles it.

Anyone have any ideas?

Next up: mushrooms. If Paul Sterry’s Complete Irish Wildlife is anything to go by, I’m guessing the pointy cylindrical mushrooms are the shaggy ink cap, Coprinus comatus. The book says they’re typically seen in “troops” in grassy areas between August and October, so that fits the bill. If it is the shaggy ink cap it will liquefy and blacken as it gets older, the first of which also happened to Michael Jackson, the second of which didn’t.

It’s the last photo of the wide cone-shaped mushroom that has me stumped – any ideas?

Photographed by Nicholas_T

Southwest view from Wyalusing Rocks, Bradford County, along Route 6. The North Branch of the Susquehanna River is in the foreground.

– License

In the post about the size of a raindrop, we began a consideration of the magnitudes of the objects studied in meteorology. Today we continue, but we are going the opposite direction — not down to the objects smaller than a raindrop, but upwards in size, through some of the cloud forms.
Just to get oriented, we begin once more with [0] — the consideration of things that are one meter or so in length, width, or height. We might have said: anything from 1/3 or a meter to 3 meters or so. A child, a young scientist, standing in a puddle with an umbrella wondering whether he will be the lucky one to find a weather balloon would be a display of some weather objects in this size range.
When I was in college, I used to ride a bike to Mass in the morning in Florida, and there would be miniature fogs about 4 feet off the ground, and just a few feet wide. I’ve never seen that sort of fog body since.
Tendrils of sea smoke can be in this size range, possibly smaller.

[1] Ten meters is the next size range: about the size of a house or a mature maple tree.

• Let us consider that right above our young meteorologist, the smallest of the fair weather clouds are barely beginning to form. They form, float away from their sources, and quickly die.
• But on a different kind of day, only the curled edges of a cloud would be in the size range of his house, though they seem smaller because of their distance.
• Before the sky is entirely caught into gray sheets, a few small gray shreds still float by at the size of small establishments such as houses, stores, and small yards. Because of the immense distance of the sun, its rays arrive on earth so close to parallel that as long as there is some sun, our meteorologist can verify the sizes of small clouds by the sizes of their shadows.
• Little drifts of fog form in the evening near creeks or low places in a field.
• Widths of tornadoes are generally in this size range.
• Typical waterspouts are here.

[2] But as weather systems build, 100 meter items, the size of football fields, quickly turn up.

• All of us have seen the little whirlwinds of snow that sculpt our drifts all winter. But snonados can get a little larger. Here’s an interesting view from You tube, just by way of reminding us that the physics of the wind is the same everywhere. It’s what heat adds to it that makes the most intense forms of weather. Never much heat in a snowdrift.

[3] Here we are at 1000 meters, one kilometer.

• Low, fair-weather cloud heights might be as little as a kilometer.
• As the sky fills, many cloud-bases will be one or a few kilometers above the ground.
• A cumulus congestus is likely to be a kilometer wide and high.
• Larger clouds come in many shapes and at many heights. It’s hard to judge the width of a cloud, but you can learn to do it. When you drive along, notice how far you have to drive to actually pass a cloud. Bring your cloud viewers in the car and watch the odometer — don’t do this when you’re the driver, of course. In time, you’ll get used to what you are seeing.
• In the tree-covered mountains of New England, roads may be marked after a summer rain because the mist rises above their hot pavements and hovers above the treetops.
• The pannus clouds that form on the front end of a storm are only as deep as a field or two but may roil along in lines that are a few kilometers long.

[4] What features of weather are 6 miles tall, wide, or long? This is about 10 kilometers?

Of course there are many other such objects that might have been listed. If I left out your favorite, drop me a line.  We’ll extend the size range next time. Meantime, ask yourself, what is the largest object you can think of which makes a contribution to weather on Earth? And what is the smallest?

ADELAIDE BASED COLLABORATIVE DESIGN FIRM ENOKI, CREATED THESE STUNNING PENDANT LIGHTS WHICH I SAW AT LAST WEEKEND’S BOWER BIRD BAZAAR AT THE QUEEN’S THEATRE.  BEAUTIFUL!

Looks like there’s another busy week in the forecast… Stay tuned for later developments.  I swear college is taking years off my life…

A tidbit for the time being courtesy of Dictionary.com:

cu⋅mu⋅lus

 [kyoo-myuh-luhs]

–noun, plural -lus.

1.	a heap; pile.

2.	a cloud of a class characterized by dense individual elements in the form of puffs, mounds, or towers, with flat bases and tops that often resemble cauliflower: as such clouds develop vertically, they form cumulonimbus.

Origin:
1650–60; < NL (L: mass, pile)

Cumulus clouds can form in any air where they can get off the ground. When they are well-separated in the sky and have full and calm forms, they really do mean that the weather will be fair for a while, and in addition, they tell low-flying pilots where the updrafts are. So that’s nice; it’s like having an updraft map right there in the sky.

Cotton-edged cumulus, formed in the wake of a cold front, have frozen vapors.

But once the vapor is up there, it can freeze, and then the edges are soft and cottony, instead of clean and sharp. One day, the whole sky was filled with fresh cumulus, all of them soft-edged on every side. A cold front had just come in, and, though it was still August, it was cold on the ground and much colder in the sky.

I put in the trees so you would know I wasn’t just out of focus.

No such thing as Cumulus mushroom, but the event is clear enough. When cumulus are swelling and getting congested, sometimes one cell breaks through the local “ceiling” of cloud and starts a new cell several hundred feet above. The new cell is connected to the old, of course, because that’s where its vapor is supplied from, and the connection is visible because the vapor is condensed enough to be white or gray. It looks like a big fat mushroon growing on top of the cauliflower.

Secondary cumulus has lost the connection with its parent cloud.

But when this secondary cloud formed, there was so much wind up there that the stem of the mushroom was soon disconnected from its supply line and began to evaporate. It went very quickly, and meantime, Mike is trying to pull over for me to take a picture, so by the time I got it, the stem had broken quite off. I suppose I should say it dissipated, not that it evaporated, because its contents probably rose into the mushroom or into this soft ring that unexpectedly formed around the original mushroom.

cumulus upon cumulus

A small cumulus cloud is a single convection cell, with the look of a single section of cauliflower. When the convection cell is quite strong, it may pull other potential cells into its rising column, and may then blossom with several heads at the top. If it gets enough to look slightly out of control, it’s called cumulus congestus.

Sky full of large cumulus coming out of the west, and winds in the sky and on the ground both out of the west.

Our most pleasant weather comes with western winds out of the west, so this is hopeful, but these are not gentle cumulus in a quiet sky. They are racing. What’s the big rush? I don’t know. Maybe they are chasing the low pressure system off our coastline, Hurrican Bill. Could they chase something so distant? Well, he’s hundreds of miles wide, and they must be chasing something. 

One interesting thing about cumulus is their tops. When the tops are crisp like cauliflower, they are made of water vapor. when they soften to look like cotton, the vapor has frozen, so it’s quite cool up there. Today, it is cool up there.