“Gray skies, nothing but gray skies, from now on”

Well, at least much of today anyway. The title for today is from Gershwin, of course, and the version of a song he later changed to “Blue Skies” (really old version here)–this was after he moved from New York, an extremely cloudy state, to southern California (“Hollywood”,  in 1936) where weathermen can sleep for six months due to soporifically boring weather, to emphasize that weather aspect there with redundancy since “soporific” means boring as well.  I lived there in so. Cal., myself, San Fernando Valley, growing up and I know first hand.  Slept out in the backyard with doggie in case a sprinkle fell out of Altocumulus in the summers and didn’t want to miss it1 That’s how bad it was weatherwise.

Continuing, Gershwin didn’t think “Gray Skies” was so uplifting as a song, and he eventually changed the title to something more “accessible” as a popular song (who wants to think about Altostratus, or, Stratocumulus???).

BTW, you won’t find facts like this on other blogs;  in fact, to be redundant with the word “fact”, won’t find this kind of information anywhere else at all!

We got us some more of that Altostratus overhead today, and in places, embedded or separate patches of Altocumulus (droplet clouds), and you know what this means.  Its snowing up there above 15,000 feet above ground level, and if Ms. Mt. Lemmon was only a few thousand feet higher, there would be PLENTY of snow on top. There could be some spectacular sunrises/sunsets today and tomorrow as this stream of tropical moisture aloft passes by.  Be ready.

Yesterday’s clouds

First, a couple of “action” shots, ones where glaciation is taking place:

6:48 AM. You know the drill, (the cloud) used to be this, and now its that. Droplets to ice, its a natural thing.
6:48 AM. You know the drill, (the cloud) used to be this, and now its that. “Droplets to ice;  its a natural thing.”  The droplet cloud on the right side is Altocumulus perlucidus (looks somewhat like a honeycomb).

 

6:47 AM. Some more of that over there. Sometimes I have called the icy small patches, "The Ghosts of Perlucidus." (Happens because the clouds are not only real cold, but damn cold (usually less than -30 C (-22 F).
6:47 AM. Some more of that over there. Sometimes I have called the icy small patches, “The Ghosts of Perlucidus.” (Happens because the clouds are not only real cold, but damn cold (usually less than -25 C (-13 F).

 The weather ahead

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The End.

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1 In case you don’t believe me, maybe I just made that up about sleeping out, only pretending to be some kind of weather fanatic in this blog,  this picture for the doubters out there from those summer days with doggie in the backyard;  hoping for a drop so I could enter it in my weather diary.  Oh, yeah, I had one.

I hope you’re happy now.  I put it in full size so that you could see it was me, not someone else.

August
August

 

 

By Art Rangno

Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.