How High the Cloud?

My very own "glory." (All photos by The Accidental Naturalist.)
         Lucky, I got my window seat on a recent  Southwest flight to the East Coast. This time I was way forward of the wing in the bulk-head seats, which provide lots of leg room and no wing or engine to get in the way of my view of the clouds. It was an early morning flight and I sat on the left side of the plane. This was an unplanned but inspired choice because it meant I would be facing north, with the southern-arcing sun lighting up the clouds and landscape and casting the shadow of the plane onto the clouds.
    This meant that I had the possibility of photographing that optical, cloud-related phenomenon called a "glory." I wrote about this is a previous blog where you'll find the full explanation, a diagram, and a few photos that are not my own. I felt bad about the photos, but I never thought I'd capture one of these beauties myself. Now I have. Tip: If you fly eastward in the morning, sit on the left.
   I was fascinated by these clouds on our way into Chicago. They look like furrowed fields, but are clouds lined up in an undulating formation referred to as "cloud streets." The rows line up parallel to the wind and are created by spiraling air flow produced by a combination of convection and wind.
   I am 51 percent sure these are cumulus clouds, though higher altocumulus clouds also line themselves into neat rows like this. I tried to find a photograph of clouds similar to this one, but failed. So, how to make the call? I resort to some guess-timating based on altitude. Because I was taking these photographs, I knew we were above 10,000 feet. Why? At 10,000 feet, Southwest Airlines requires electronic devices to be turned off.
  Cumulus clouds typically form between 2,000-3,000 feet and I was definitely looking down on these clouds. But were they 8,000-9,000 feet below the plane? Hmmm. The other option was the higher altocumulus clouds, which typically form between 6,500 and 23,000 feet. Hmmm. These would be pretty low altocumulus clouds. I didn't see any clouds below these--an altitude-betraying cumulus, for instance.
   I was tempted to ask the stewardess to make an announcement: "Is there a meteorologist on the plane? We have an emergency."
   I kept taking photographs for a full hour after this photo above--and we were still looking down on these clouds as we descended into Midway Airport. I took this photo:  
   Help! Help! Help! Cumulus? Altocumulus? Something else? Stayed tuned.

Warm Sun, Icy Skies, Bittern

Cirrus duplicatus over Enumclaw, Washington
  Our recent and most-welcome warm weather in Western Washington this week has brought warm temperatures (50s F) and cloudy skies to the region. Cloudy?! locals might gasp. Yes, cloudy, the Accidental Naturalist insists. I'm on a mission to restore the good name of "cloudy" and divorce it from its knee-jerk association with low, gray, rain-making clouds. This weekend was cloudy. Just look.
   Saturday, my husband and I drove toward Enumclaw for a snow-free, low-elevation hike along the White River. With the dog. Who needed a leg-stretch. Who got us out on a rails-to-trails path outside the town of Buckley. Where we watched the skies get crazy with cirrus clouds that first caught my husband's eye because they looked "square."
   Nature isn't too fond of square shapes, especially in the cloud department, but these clouds had some edges and corners (at least from our perspective):
"Square" clouds indicate cirrus at more than one altitude with winds blowing the filaments in different directions.
  Once we started looking up at these clouds, we couldn't stop looking. Then the breeze kicked up. We walked a bit further, looking east, west, north, and south toward Mt. Rainier. We couldn't figure out what the skies were telling us. So I told my husband I thought the sky was "thickening" a bit and it would likely rain in 24 hours. Maybe 36. This was a mistake. I figured I had a 70-30 chance of being right. It was, after all, February in the Pacific Northwest. Often, cirrus clouds to portend rain. But only if they show a marked progression of lowering (to cirrostratus, altostratus, nimbostratus...rain). These cirrus dominated the sky.
I'm not sure what's going on here with this leaping cirrus cloud.
Here we have cirrus fibratus (I'm 86% sure) and what appears to be a salmonid migration of small altocumulus lenticularis.
  I have about fifty photographs of the skies on Saturday. I will spare you only so I have your attention for what happened on Sunday--another cloudy day in South Puget Sound. Look!
Clouds at sunset at Nisqually NWR. During the Super Bowl.  It is challenging to tell cirrocumulus from altocumulus--I haven't acquired the skill yet to judge the size of the cloudlets or height of the clouds. I'm working on it.
Heading west on the I-5 toward the Black Hills, the clouds produced a feature that looked like whale's baleen.  I believe these are trailing ice-crystals called virga. 
  At this point, you might be wondering why I seem to know so little about the clouds I saw this weekend. The problem is that despite my studying, constant use of cloud guides, sky guides, weather blogs, and National Weather Service data, it's difficult to match the clouds I'm seeing at any one moment to the data available. And no matter how many photographs I scrutinize, the clouds in the pictures (the supposed "type specimen") never quite match the pictures I've taken. Unlike the American Bittern.
An American Bittern, one of four seen hunting during the Super Bowl at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.
  Under those gorgeous sunset skies at Nisqually on Sunday, my husband and I were able to identify the secretive and camouflaged marsh bird--the American Bittern. This relative of the herons was hunting in the reeds and grass along one of the inner boardwalks. It looked just like its photograph in the Audubon field guide. We walked a bit further. And we saw four more bitterns. They looked and acted like the field guides said they would. It was so simple. And so satisfying.


The Water Cycle to the Rescue

Not your mother's water cycle.
   So there I was, trying to get a handle on The Water Cycle and its many graphic renditions when The Book Structure suddenly appeared. I had been standing in front of my laptop for a while now, messing with chapter files, cutting and pasting things, dragging files into folders, rearranging folders, and never feeling quite certain that all my notes on clouds would ever flow into a unified whole. 
    Over the weekend, I left the laptop behind, took up pencil and paper, and worked my many chapter headings into a new order. After three days, I had circled a lot of words and drawn a lot of arrows to move them up and down on the paper. 
   Because my book on clouds is not plot driven, I needed an overall structure that would allow me to get from A to Z gracefully. My book is a funny hybrid--that personal narrative non-fiction genre--that is not exactly a collection of essays, a thriller-paced adventure in the clouds story, or a look-what-I-saw-today-whilst-wandering-and-musing natural history. Organizing my book by the ten cloud types seemed forced as there are some cloud types (altostratus for example) that didn't beg for their own chapter. I thought about a four-season approach, but the clouds don't want to cooperate. I studied the tables of content of some of my favorite books on clouds and natural history to see what I could steal. Nothing made my fingers itch so I switched gears and ended up on the floor with all the books I could find that contained an illustration of the water cycle (below).    
But probably your mother's shag carpet.
    I sat in the middle of all of these books, ignoring my cup of coffee (upper right), the clock without batteries and my laptop which decided to hibernate, and my prize-winning terrain model of western Washington (all top). Because there were so many books, I had to lunge onto my knees to reach each one from my spot in the middle of the floor. It was sure easier on my back than sitting at a big table or standing at my laptop and, after a few hours of lunging and squatting and reaching and stretching, I realized I was kind of doing yoga. 
   The physical part of yoga (the postures) I am told, is intended to prepare your body for the mental part of yoga (the meditation). Move your body for an hour and you can more easily sit still for another hour. During the second hour you will more easily experience inner calm, an insight, or an epiphany. Here is what my epiphany looked like:  
Writing a book is child's play!  
  Maybe "epiphany" is too strong here. "Idea" is probably more suitable. What I had to say about clouds, it seemed, fell naturally into a pattern or structure that resembled a water cycle. I got out my scissors and tape and colored paper and chopped up my chapter titles, my list of themes, meteorological principles,cloud types, and geographic locations and then grouped them into the water cycle functions:  Evaporation, Transport, Condensation, Evapo-transpriation, Precipitation, and Run-off. I shuffled things around a bit and then taped all my pesky little pieces of color-coded paper onto large yellow cards. By the end of the day I had arranged these cards into a funky but functional water cycle. 
   I was feeling really good about my work until my 17-year-old son appeared in the doorway to my paper-strewn office and said without the least bit of curiosity, "What the hell, Mom?"
   I looked up, smiled proudly, and said, "It's my book."