Cliff Mass on June Gloom

What a grouch pot.

I follow University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass's Weather Blog  but Monday's on "June Gloom" confirmed that many people prefer clouds when they accompany a wallop of dramatic weather. The more subtle clouds such as the stratus--the force behind the "June Gloom" are maligned as boring, oppressive, and frustrating to life itself. Here is what Mass says about them in his blog:

"June Gloom, one of the frustrations of life west of the Cascade crest, has arrived early and the results--incessant low clouds--have arrived."  

He doesn't even use their proper name--stratus--to identify these low, layered clouds! They are merely "incessant low clouds" that are an impediment to a Pacific Northwest lifestyle. Sure, we got a delicious taste of summer in early May this year, but that doesn't entitle us to non-stop blue skies and fair-weather cumulus clouds from that point forward.

Stratus--the lowest of the ten basic cloud types--is one of my favorites, especially fog. Fog is the lowliest form of stratus cloud as it's base touches the surface of the earth (ground or water). It can hang around and make you feel gloomy, but when I started writing my book on clouds, I realized it wasn't the fog that caused this feeling. It was the fact that I was under a roof, under a ceiling, and not out in the fog.

Walking in the fog is anything but gloomy. Try it. It is rarely one shade of gray and  rarely uniform in thickness and opacity. If you get up close to fog (or slightly higher stratus) you can actually see individual water droplets. Stratus clouds are not formed by thermals (the force behind cumulus clouds as described in my previous posting), but mostly as the water vapor in warm, moist air cools and condenses as it comes in contact with or passes over cooler water or ground.

I have written much about my ramblings in fog over the past few years. My most memorable ramble included a swim in the fog. And a hot tub afterward.

To read May 25th Cliff Mass Weather Blog  click here.

Enjoy every cloudy June day!

May 27 UPDATE:  Cliff Mass Weather Blog today features beauty of low clouds! Click here!

Cross-Quarte Fog

Standing in the middle of an early August day, I know fog season is just around the corner. My yard is at its warmest, ripest, driest, and deciduously greenest. Plants are not growing or blooming, nor are they fading or drooping. They are just there in the dirt waiting. Songbirds are few, the dawn chorus is silent, nestlings have fledged. There is an eerie stillness in which a few languid bees buzz. Something in that stillness tells me the earth is exhausted and can no longer hold onto summer. The fogs are rolling in from the Pacific over the Black Hills. Our warm landscape, clear skies, and cool nights create the possibility of patchy fog in our fields and valleys and over our lakes.

   This is the feeling of one of the cross-quarter point—the halfway point between the summer solstice (June 21) and the autumn equinox (September 22). When I mention this to friends, they say they have noticed something, too—something in the air or in the quality of light—but they didn’t know it was called the cross-quarter or had a name at all.

  Most of us don't celebrate these cross-quarter points, but ancient cultures did as these were important times to plant, to harvest, to move, to stay, to respond to the living planet. Each quarter point has a Gaelic-Celtic name:  This year, February 2 is Imbolc, May 5 is Beltane, August 7 is Lughnasa, and November 11 is Samain.

You may have heard of these names if you are familiar with things Celtic, pagan, or the novels of Mary Renault. I had heard of Lughnasa (spelled in various ways, but all pronounced Loon-na-sah) only because of the 1998 movie Dancing at the Lughnasa, starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon. The movie, based on a 1990 play, is set in 1936 in County Donegal, Ireland, during a summer of personal "turning points" for five sisters.

 Lughnasa marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. (Though our calendars mark September 21 or 22 as the first day of autumn, that day of equal day and night really marks the peak of autumn and the beginning of winter. (In the same odd way, when we celebrate our birthday we say we are turning 39 or we are 39. In fact, we have completed our 39th year and are beginning our 40th).

  Every morning now is a noticeably darker, every night a little cooler, and there is nothing the earth can do about it. Resigned, the earth simply lets go and releases its summer into the autumn air. But not all at once. Slowly, and in a long series of sighs and exhalations.

On still, cool nights you can hear the tired earth sighing. In the morning, you can see the fog it has exhaled. 

Welcome Autumn!

51 Names for Fog

“Fog” is a clunky name for a cloud, especially one that appears so delicate and ethereal.  It’s a simplistic name, too, one that doesn’t do justice to the myriad and nuanced forms fog assumes across the globe. Meteorologists have added some polysyllabic complexity by describing several basic fog types: radiation fog, advection fog, freezing fog, ice fog, and upslope fog. Few people (including weather reporters) use these names. We rely instead on generic adjectives—“thick,” “dense,” “heavy,” “patchy,” or “light”—to describe most fogs we encounter.

Can’t we do better?  Why, the Eskimos have fifty words for snow!

In fact, we have done better. A recent moderate-effort search in my guidebooks to the weather, textbooks on atmospheric science, and cloud-related websites, yielded these names: air hoar, acid fog, advection fog, antarctic sea smoke, arctic sea smoke, arctic mist, black fog, cacimbo, California fog, caribou fog, dry fog, evaporation fog, flash fog, fog streamer, fog bank, fog bow, fog belt, fog drip, fog horizon, force 10 fog, frontal fog, frost smoke, frozen fog, freezing fog, frost smoke, ground fog, high fog, hill fog, ice fog, killer fog, London Fog, mixing fog, mist, monsoon fog, pea souper, pogonip, precipitation fog, radiation fog, frost flakes, rime fog, sea fog, sea mist, sea smoke, smog, steam devil, steam fog, supercooled fog, tule fog, upslope fog, and valley fog, and water smoke.

Unless you live in the U.K., you might not know about the "pea souper," the local name for the famous and infamous thick fog that occurs there. Thick fogs have always occurred naturally in London, but they became increasingly toxic during the Industrial Revolution when factories and fireplaces belched black smoke and soot from burning cheap sulfur-laden coal. Once-benign fogs formed around the particles of smoke and soot and became dangerous to breathe.  

In December 1952, one especially thick pea souper hung over London for five days and caused widespread coughing, choking, bronchitis, lung inflammation, and the deaths of 12,000 people from respiratory failure. An estimated 4000 people died during the five days and another 8000 in the months afterward.

This nightmarish cloud event and public-health crisis lead to the passage of the 1956 Clean Air Act in the United Kingdom. Though coal burning has decreased, pea soupers still occur in London, though they contain the “smoke” of automobile exhaust and industrial air pollutants instead of burning coal. In London as elsewhere, this menacing cloud is known as smog—a name derived from combining smoke and fog. 

Click here to read more about the Great Fog of 1952.

Still Life with Clouds

  When my family and I arrived at a lakeside cabin last Friday night, the sky was threatening: it was dark, clear, and full of stars. I had hoped for a few clouds at least, but no, it promised to be a sunny March weekend in the Pacific Northwest.

I decided to make the most of it by watching the sunrise from the dock the next morning. Maybe I'd see some birds. At 6:30, the sky looked gray and clumpy. I tiptoed outside, to end of the frost-covered dock, into the clouds. 

    The sky and the lake were full of low, soft gray clouds. In between, against the dark hills of the far shore, pillows of mist floated past. Below the mist, the lake held the reflection of the hills, mist, sky, and clouds. I inched my feet to the edge of the dock. I peered down into the lake. 

    The water was clear, but I couldn’t see beyond the surface where the clouds floated and rippled. I let my gaze wander, following the clouds across the lake, into the mist, up the hills to the horizon in front of me where the clouds began and to the imposing wall of firs behind me where the clouds disappeared. I turned and looked at the cozy house whose rooms held my still-sleeping family, whose glass façade held two stories of reflected clouds.

 What were all these clouds? The mist, being mist and not fog, was not strictly a cloud. There were patches of hilltop-hugging stratus. And well above hills were low clouds that appeared in layers, clumpy layers, wispy layers, and wispy clumps. A mix, in other words. I have learned that if I say "a mix," I usually mean stratocumulus.   

  Stratocumulus clouds are the second most officially varied of the ten cloud types (next to altocumulus) and occur in three species, seven varieties, and in colors from white to gray to dark blue-gray. Their shape, arrangement of cloud elements, and their color are all variable. They may arise from the break up of stratus clouds, the spreading out of cumulus clouds, or the remnants of cumulonimbus. They might develop into stratus, cumulus, or altocumulus clouds. They are easy to confuse with stratus, nimbostratus, and altocumulus clouds. Stratocumulus embody cloudiness—they are varied, dynamic, uncommitted, and hard to pin down. Though they are one of the most common clouds in the Pacific Northwest, they have always rebuffed my attempts at identifying them with any certainty in the field—a fact that makes them my favorite problem cloud.  

    So when I write that the mix of early-morning clouds I saw from the dock were stratocumulus, what I meant was that most of the clouds I saw in the hour I was watching seemed to behave like stratocumulus. What does this even mean? It means that I did my best and, once I had done my best, I moved on. Someone else’s best might have turned my stratocumulus into stratus or altocumulus and perhaps with good reason. Here are mine.  

    My stratocumulus appeared to be undecided about their altitude. One moment they seemed low enough to be stratus or fog—a form they could have metamorphosed from earlier in the morning. The next moment they seemed high enough to be considering a future as altocumulus. During the forty-five moments I watched them from the dock, they never did scream stratocumulus.

   It wasn’t that kind of a morning anyway.

   Everything was quiet and fluid.

   It was time to move on. 

The pale sky took on a pink tinge.

I isolated one wispy puff of cloud in the sky and then tried to find its match in the lake. Other than being a mirror image, what, I wondered, were the differences in the two clouds? Did the reflection of the clouds in the lake reveal something about the clouds that was hidden in the sky? I thought I remembered something about the tricks polarized sunlight, refraction, and reflection played on the human eye, but couldn’t recall the details just then.

  I caught the wobbly call of single loon. I watched three fly low across the water in front of me.

   The turned the clouds a bright white on their east side and cast gray shadow on their west. The once-flat clouds took on dimension and depth.

   I looked down at my sandaled feet. I stood in a circle—a small circle my feet had melted in the frost-covered wooden dock. Maybe in the summer when the dock is warm I will dive into this lake and into the clouds.

   The sun began to glint over the ridge to my right. I looked west and saw the tall trees that caught the first light. When the sun reached my feet, I decided, I would go inside, make a cup of coffee, rattle around, wake everyone up and lure them outside to greet the day. I had no idea how quickly the sun would travel across the lake. I was in no rush. 

   I heard a kingfisher in the distance. I watched a bald eagle fly from behind me toward the opposite shore. A dozen small birds twittered above the lake, turning together like schooling fish. A raven called from the ridge behind me saying something in a language I felt I should know.

  The clouds seemed intent on becoming something more simple and distinctive. Had my stratocumulus become cumulus or had they been cumulus all along in a different light? 

 My feet were in sunlight at 7:15. I turned go inside. I had already lived an entire day. 

Everything else was going to be gravy, icing, gilt, luxury. 

Photo courtesy MD Ruth