Cloud of the Week #13

   This is Cloud of the Week Number 13. I don't know what kind of cloud it is or what it means in terms of weather. And, honestly, I don't much care right now. Sometimes clouds are metaphors. This is one of those clouds and this is one of those times.
    I spent the past few weeks saying goodbye to my mother who had a heart attack on May 20th. My extended family and I spent nearly three with her in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cool cloths on her forehead, talking to her, looking deep into her eyes.
  Hour by hour, we followed her progress. We asked a thousand questions of each and every nurse, cardiologist, pulmonologist, infection disease doctor, and intensive care specialist who cared for her. We listened to their answers. We asked follow-up questions. And follow-ups to the follow-ups. We called on our friends who were doctors to translate. We learned much about her failing heart and our breaking hearts.
   We watched the vital signs monitor over her bed--the one that measures blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, and several other functions. The black screen flashed color-coded numbers and wave lines that rose and fell in distinctive patterns in bands across the screen.
   The information on the monitor offered no comfort. Nor did what we learned from the nurses and doctors with each passing day. I looked elsewhere for solace--first to the sky and clouds, but the humid hazy sky was bereft of clouds. The morning birdsong lost its beauty. So, too, did the beautiful branching trees in their summer green, the yellow lilies and "knock-out" roses in the garden, the splashing fountain, the deer and fox on the lawn, the meadow of grasses blowing in the wind. For once, Nature could provide no solace, comfort, or metaphor for my sadness. Everything was what it was and nothing more.  
    Flying back from my first visit, however, I photographed the cloudscape (above) from 38,000 feet. I thought it was some kind of joke and shut my window shade.

   Flying back from my second visit, the last with my mother, the clouds were different.

    They looked like they were trying to be comforting, trying to look like the kinds of clouds that an Italian painter might try to capture in a fresco, the kind of clouds where angels, gods, and goddesses could dwell, the kind of clouds you might want your mother to settle into for eternity--but only if she had not been so happy down below on the earth. And she was.

Leave Me Behind...Please!

Rapture Cloud or just plain ol' Cumulonimbus? Photo taken at 8:14 p.m. in Washington, DC, by an alert cloudspotter who will likely be in heaven three hours ahead of me accounting for the time difference and all.

  As some of you may know, Saturday--May 21, 2011, is rumored to be Judgement Day, the day of Rapture that precedes the End of the World which is scheduled for October 21 (I am not sure exactly what time). But don't take my word for it, there are plenty of web sites with proof, many using big scary clouds like this one enhance the "truthiness" of the claims.
  Me? I am just going to relax and enjoy our Pacific Northwest blue skies tomorrow. I hope you do the same. But, if you're worried about anything happening in the next six months or so, take comfort in the fact that there are plenty of "Left Behind" services being offered by entrepreneurs. You can find out which services--and pay for them in advance on the Internet. Think about it! Who is going to feed your dog?
  

The Accidental Cloud Spotter

   What a glorious morning! I woke early and decided to bite the bullet and ride my bike to the Co-op for a the first time. The Co-op is just 3 miles from my house, but is not along a scenic route or full bike-laned, so I usually drive. But today, I need just a few things and I needed to get out. I attached the buckets to the back of bike and set off.

  I am kind of a wimpy bike rider, but it's Bicycle Commuter Month here in Olympia, and I needed to rack up some miles doing errands. I work from home and do not commute, but errands count. Recreational biking does not. On Mother's Day Sunday my husband dragged me on a seemingly endless 19.8-mile ride and, because I was in agony, I begged him to let me stop somewhere and buy something, dammit, so I could count  each and every mile. "That's not the point," he said. 

   I dreaded my ride to the Co-op and half expected to be run over by a car when I hit the short, uphill stretch of road with no bike lane. But, on this morning, the car traffic was light; I had timed  my ride (accidentally) to occur after the 8 o'clock school rush and before the 9 o'clock school rush. It was a breeze and I was at the Co-op in less than 20 minutes. I was in agony-free ecstasy. 

  I parked my bike, bought a few essentials that make me sound like I live on a Tuscan commune (olive oil, milk, yogurt, Dr. Bronner's soap, kale, polenta), and then strolled into the Co-op Garden to drink my coffee and call a friend to wish her a Happy Birthday. I pulled a few clumps of weeds, found someone's sunglasses, set them on the picnic table, talked for half an hour. I was home before 9 and still ahead of schedule for my 12-5 writing day.

    So, I loaded up my car with things to recycle, donate, and dispose of responsibly--you know, the things that had been piled in the front hall for two weeks. To save on gas, I decided to drive a loop that would take me to the county landfill where I would dispose of my many compact fluorescent light bulbs at HazoHouse, drop some things off at the on-site Goodwill, walk my dog at the on-site dog park, then visit a friend for a walk on our wonderful rails-to-trails path.  

   I set out thinking I knew where the landfill was. When the right turn onto the road leading to the landfill failed to appear again and again and again, I turned the car around. I was going to be late to visit my friend. Oh, but the dog! There he sat in the back, with a full bladder, panting. Luckily, I hadn't mentioned the D-o-g P-a-r-k.  He would just have to endure a fast-paced leashed walk with me and my friend.  

   The hour-plus walk was wonderful despite my dog having to mark his territory every twelve feet one way and having to be dragged back by his leash the other. 

  After our walk, I consulted my map and set out for the landfill. About ten minutes into the trip, I pulled the car over, whipped out my cell phone and called my husband.

   "Can you check real quick to see when HazoHouse is open? I'm on my way there, but am thinking they close mid-week." 

    Less than a minute later my suspicions were confirmed. I headed home, passing the Co-op as I did, bummed out that my eco-plan du jour had bombed. 

    The silver lining of my tiny cloud was that my driving around allowed me a view of the sky I would not have gotten from my bike. Well, I could have gotten it from my bike, but it would have been agonizing.

   What I saw was the celestial dome covered in cirrus clouds--long, long cirrus "mare's tails," the hooked cirrus uncinus, cirrus intortus, and cirrus fibratus, and the thick cirrostratus cloud from which most seemed to originate to the north. The sky was spectacular, almost like fireworks. And, of course, I had not brought my camera. 

  When I got home, I found my camera, went outside and could not see the "mother cloud," but captured this: 

     And this:

  

  Which is just a tiny, tree-hampered view, a slice, a glimpse, a fraction of the sky en route to the landfill. But isn't it wonderful?

  

Cloud of the Week #12: Cirrocumulus

Cirrocumulus (on the right) All photos by M. Ruth

  I hope everyone was outside yesterday watching the skies clear for our 24-hour high-pressure respite from the rain. I walked out the front yard just after high noon and, what to my wondering eyes did appear, these miniature clouds and no sign of rain, dear. 

  I ran back inside for my polarized sun glasses and my camera, then my chair and my laptop, then some meteorology books and articles. I was going to camp out and watch the show of these tiny little ice-crystal cloudlets called cirrocumulus--our long-overdue-but-worth-the-wait Cloud of the Week #12. 

  From what I could see from my front yard facing west (below), the lower, thicker stratocumulus clouds were moving eastward over the Black Hills and were lifting, eroding, scattering as they traveled inland.

 Around midday, upper-level clouds started moving in aloft--these cirrocumulus at chilling heights of 16,500-45,000 feet. It seemed as if they were condensing into ice-crystal clouds in the swath of sky between the Black Hills and my home 20 miles to the east. Because these cirrocumulus clouds appeared in bands (below) they are called cirrocumulus radiatus.

   I had never seen--or perhaps never took the time to see--the very irregular shapes of the individual cloudlets that made up these clouds (below). These cloudlets are often described as "rice grains" to distinguish them from the much larger and lower altocumulus cloudlets which are more "bread-roll" sized. But calling them rice grains makes it sound as if the cloudlets were uniform in shape and size. The clouds yesterday were neither. They were more whimsical and energetic, kind of like what would happen if you dipped a cat's paws in white paint and set him loose on a blue tarp with a moth.

    Because I am trying to understand what really made these clouds, I consulted the National Weather Service forecast report for Olympia yesterday and its seems that we were enjoying a weak high pressure ridge. This is what that looks like on a weather map:

For more details on this and a time-lapse of yesterday's clouds, go to www.cliffmass.blogspot.com

  What's funny (to me) is that the National Weather Service report predicted "Just scattered clouds this afternoon..."  Just scattered clouds? I think not. Here they are (below)

 
 Now, you can see in the left side of this photograph the faint  trails of ice crystals, called virga, in the wake of the cloudlets. And then, because I couldn't go inside (or stop looking up), I watched a jet fly through a thickened layer of cirrocumulus (cirrocumulus stratiformis), cutting a dissipation trail (distrail). At first it looked like this:

 
And then it began to deteriorate into a cloud from I believe few people would recognize (below). Had I not been out in my front yard not writing, I would not have see the jet (the smoking gun) and the initial disstrail to know what this weird fanged cloud was. Oh, just scattered clouds.

  
And then the whole show ended with another set of undulating clouds (below) lining up like sardines in first class--not too crowded. What a day.