Curious Cirrus Get Curiouser

     I love the website of the U.K.-based Cloud Appreciation Society. Where else can you post photographs of Pacific Northwest clouds you don't understand before you go to bed and have your answer by the time you log in the next morning? 
   A few days ago, I posted here a blog titled Ice Comet?, which featured the strange behavior of the cirrus cloud (above) and my attempt to explain what was happening to it. I could not find a match for this particular comet-like cirrus in any of my cloud field guides or online resources. I understand the basics of cirrus formation in the upper atmosphere, but this one didn't fit any progression I had encountered.
     So, I posted my blog on the Cloud Appreciation Society's General Discussion Forum where thousands of cloud lovers around the world chat and share their observations and exquisite photos of clouds. I received this reply from some helpful someone:


A nice piece of observation, Maria, and well recorded. I am not an expert, but happy to offer some thoughts. As you suggest, it is Cirrus uncinus and I would suggest CH1.The RK Pilsbury photo coming closest to yours: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/publications/clouds/ch1/eg2.html
   Yours is unique in my limited experience in having but one cloud, and one with a filament which is both rotating and in unusual directions.
   For CH1, Richard Hamblyn, The Cloud Book, says '... are usually formed when layers of relatively dry air ascend in the upper troposphere, the small amount of vapour then subliming into ice when it meets its subzero dew point...'.
   Thereafter the wind picks up the falling ice crystals and draws them into the filaments. I would hazard a guess that you must have some wind shear around that dew point boundary. 
  I do not know how to beginning thinking about "wind shear around a dew point boundary." The mind fairly boggles. Which is the beauty of clouds.I have sent photos of this cloud onto an actual meteorologist who lived and breathed Pacific Northwest clouds for thirty years.
  I will post his thoughts on this curious cirrus next week. Meanwhile...don't forget to look up.

Where I Live

   This is not my barn, nor is it the view from my house. But in the larger sense, it is where I live, though I have only been to this particular spot near my home twice.
    My interest in clouds these days stems from an interest in where I live and in discovering a sense of place. In the four years I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, I have been aggressive about getting to know this place--it's waterways, native plants and animals, tides, patterns of sunlight, cloud patterns, and weather. I am making some progress, but four years isn't a long time to get to know a place so you feel native...or at least not clueless.
   Transforming residents into real natives is one of the goals of the Northwest Earth Institute, a Portland-based organization with a lofty mission "motivating individuals to examine and transform personal values and habits, to accept responsibility for the earth, and to act on that commitment." If this sounds like a lifetime's work, it is, but the Northwest Earth Institute (NWEI) publishes a discussion course on "Discovering a Sense of Place"  to help make the job easier. The workbook-size paperback contain of thirty seven essays by many of the who's who of today's environmental writers, geologists, ecologists, enthnobotanists, bioregionalists, conservationists, sustainability-ists. There are also poems, maps, and beautiful black-and-white spot illustrations. Its cozy format alone makes me feel at home.
  I've been reading the essays for the past few months and though I have no plans to start a discussion group, I've been taking the messages in the book to heart.
   The first message appears on the cover of the book. It is a quote from Gary Snyder: Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there. 
   Another is from writer-farmer Wendell Berry: If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.
  And another is question number 16 in the course book's Bioregional Quiz: From where you are reading this, point north.

    Many of you will be able to point north without really thinking about it and feel good (even smug). I cannot do this reliably yet. I am working on it, though. I have started traveling with a compass, the kind with the adjustable declination. Now when I am out cloudwatching I orient myself to true and then magnetic north and then look around.
   This is what I was doing this morning when I took the photograph of the clouds and red barn. I found north. I watched the clouds. I discovered they were moving in from the southwest. I turned to face the southwest and felt the breeze on my face. I felt the sun--low in the sky to the southeast--on my back. A flock of Canada geese a hundred strong rose up from the field near the barn and settled loudly on another field.
   This is where I live. 

Don't Fence Me In....

   What a stunning morning in the hinterlands! It wasn't foggy at my house, but just a few miles north toward Woodard Bay, the fields were softened by wisps of this stratus cloud (probably closer to mist than fog at this point in the morning.
   I joined a friend for a walk along the Chehalis Western Trail and savored every minute of the hour, the sun, the generosity. At the edge of the trail, we stopped to admire the reflections of the cumulus clouds in a flooded field. Here there are (below) complete with fence to keep swimming cows from escaping. Not a

terribly interesting photo, you'll agree. But, if you turn the photo upside down, you create a somewhat more interesting landscape with a surreal--or merely strange--floating fence (below).
                            
 Everything but the shrub in the upper left is reflection. It's a long way from Dali or Rousseau, but I like it.