The Answer My Friends...

   As promised, more on these unusual cirrus clouds I photographed a few weeks back and blogged about. I sent my photos to Art Rangno in Arizona for an explanation of the dramatic "tail" shifting (it did a 180-degree turn, from the 3 o'clock position to the 9 o'clock position as I watched it).

  Art Rangno has spent most of his life studying and loving clouds, 30 years of it as a meteorologist with UW's Department of Atmospheric Sciences in Seattle. He is an accomplished scientist in the field of airborne cloud studies and is the creative genius, photographer, and writer of the popular "guide to the sky" cloud posters, which got me hooked on clouds in the first place. Speaking of hooks....

The cirrus clouds above are called cirrus uncinus (hooked cirrus) and here is what Art knows about them: 

   

    Cirrus uncinus usually, as we think of it, has a hook, but it can also be a tuft at the top as in your first photo [below].

  

This would have happened many minutes before your first photo, likely over the horizon and out of view, as indicated by the length of the fallstreifen, aka, ice crystals.  At first, the formation of a cirrus uncinus is hard-looking, sharp edged dots and it has been suggested that they are water drops before almost instantly converting to ice (temperatures are generally below -30 C).  There must be some updraft to do create those specs, somewhat like in cumulus, but much more gentle, perhaps of the order of just a mile or two per hour.   One of the signs that there was an updraft with stronger and weaker portions is the stranding that shows different sizes of particles developed when the cloud formed. The different sizes are due to the differences in updraft velocities, the larger crystals forming where the updrafts were that bit stronger.  

They are formed, from time to time, out of the blue as something that would resemble a patch of cirrocumulus, a granulated cloud patch [below], though usually the granules are more splotchy. 

 At the stage you have photographed this cloud, they are usually "done", at least in their updraft stage, and now  the crystals are merely settling out from the original location, and as they do, you get to see how the wind changes with height, normally the crystals falling into regions of somewhat lower wind speeds below the "head" and leaving a comet's tail below.

The reason that they exist is that the air up there is likely saturated with respect to ice, or, below the head, very close to it.  The longer and lower the tail goes, the deeper the near ice-saturation layer.The crystals in these clouds are almost always bullet rosettes [below], BTW, ones that can get pretty large, and hence, fall relatively fast compared to the smaller crystals in haze like ice clouds such as a high veil of cirrostratus.

Photo courtesy Cal Tech

         

Wind, Moon, and Clouds

  A friend sent me a text message Monday night:

go out and look at clouds

  I was inside at the time hoping the wind that was whistling through my storm door was not going to bring down one of the Douglas-firs in my backyard. My instincts told me to stay inside, but once I stepped out the front door, I threw caution to the wind (literally) and stayed out for the next hour.

   Stratus clouds were flying past the quarter moon. From my front yard, I watched the trees dance, the moon play hide-and-seek, and and endless parade of translucent clouds. What I thought was lightning flashed every few minutes, but later learned from UW meteorologist Cliff Mass that the brilliant flashes were actually power transformers blowing...which would explain why we had 200,000 people without power and many local school closures on Tuesday.
   Unfortunately, I didn't exactly figure out my camera settings to best capture this dramatic scene. I chose a "nighttime" exposure, disabled the flash, set the ISO everywhere from 80 to 1600. Next time, I will figure out how to set it for "nighttime with waxing gibbous," "high-speed clouds," "45 m.p.h wind stop-action," and "thrashing trees." And, I will learn how to have Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata play when you hover your mouse over my photographs.   

   After a dark and stormy night (hahahahhaha), the dawn was exquisite...from my side yard which faces east.

    To say the weather began to deteriorate seems wrong. Does this (above) look like deterioration? Yet, that's what it is called. And unstable. Here (below) an unstable sky with stables...the day before our first cat-and-dog rain of the season.

Clouds on the Schuykill

     This work by American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was on view in my son's college apartment where I had a chance to study it this weekend after watching his lacrosse game under grey, rainy skies.
  Biglin Brothers Racing is one of eleven works Eakins painted of John and Barney Biglin, two champion rowers from New York.  In the 1870s, rowing became one of America’s most popular spectator sports and Eakins (a rower himself) was the first to capture its muscular grace, energy, precision on the canvas. This painting dates from 1872 when the Biglin brothers visited Philadelphia and raced on the Schuykill River.
  The composition of the painting is fascinating.
  The Biglin brothers' boat seems to occupy the very center of the painting, but it does not. The curve of the stern rower's back divides the painting's left and right halves and gives the rowers a visual push out of the frame toward the right (and finish line). The bank of the river--not the brothers' boat--divides the painting horizontally and seems to squeeze the rowers into the middle of the painting as does the prow of the second boat, which, though it barely makes it onto the canvas could be a threat to our champion rowers.
  Add the trees and the boathouse and we have many strong horizontal lines. But not only horizontal lines, which would make this painting static and dull. Rowers' bodies natural move into diagonals as they row--backs, arms, thighs, calves. Their oars also create strong diagonal lines; Eakins has placed that long oar in the center of the painting.
   Oh! And just look at those clouds will you? The four cumulus clouds mirror the angle of the oar blade exactly, adding to the dynamic energy that is the diagonal line.
   Don't tell me you never noticed?
   Well, now you have and you will probably always be looking for clouds in paintings when you go to art galleries. Just don't point them out to anyone. It's obnoxious I hear.
    And, for my father, brothers, husband, sons, nieces, and nephews (rowers all) interested in more, here is a comment from a National Gallery of Art curator (and likely rower):
  "Himself an amateur oarsman and a friend of the Biglins, Eakins portrays John with his blade still feathered, almost at the end of his return motion. Barney, a split-second ahead in his stroke, watches for his younger brother’s oar to bite the water. Both ends of the Biglins’ pair-oared boat project beyond the picture’s edges, generating a sense of urgency, as does the other prow jutting suddenly into view."
    

Still Life with Fog

   I went outside Friday morning to watch the magical progression of this dense fog. I lingered, I loitered, I stood in the wet grass, I watched the geese, I tried to be still. At one point the only sound I heard was the dripping of the fog onto the bigleaf maple leaves. The fog--ground-level stratus clouds--lifted over a period of three hours. I watched them rise into the blue sky and transform themselves into cumulus clouds.

   I passed a man on the bike trail, dressed head-to-toe in camouflage. He was walking his small collie. He said, "Isn't this beautiful? You could say that you are walking in a cloud." I agreed and said I would.

   The fields were full of restless geese, rising in a panic, honking their way across the gray sky.

   

 Wouldn't this be something to surf?

And here, the fog rising and dissipating in the sun-warmed air. What a morning!