Some recent clouds I have known; updating “not pubbed” list

7:21 PM, August 13th. A sky so full of portent that evening after a clear day. This our last chance for rain for quite awhile, but Sutherland Heights and Catalina whiffed on this incoming complex of thunderstorms.
7:21 PM, August 13th.
A sky so full of portent that evening after a clear day. This our last chance for rain for quite awhile, but Sutherland Heights and Catalina whiffed on this incoming complex of thunderstorms.  But, we had a fabulous light show from a cell that developed almost overhead, pf Sutherland Heights as dark fell, but a little to the SE, dumping heavy rains in the Romero Canyon/Pusch Ridge area.
7:16 PM. A very dramatic looking shelf cloud spread across and otherwise completely clear sky that evening providing a great sunset photo op.
7:16 PM., August 13th.    A very dramatic looking shelf cloud (Stratocumulus) spread across and otherwise completely clear sky that evening providing a great sunset photo op.  Northerly winds of 25-35 mph and a temperature drop of about 10 degrees accompanied this scene.
6:57 PM. The churning, roiling motion of this turret was remarkable, almost like time-lapse there was so much of it. That easily seen churning was evidence of how unstable the atmosphere was this day, unusually cool for summer at 20, 000 feet or so leading to a strong drop in temperature from the 100 F or so here. which results in the warm air that clouds represent being more buoyant than usual, a hotter than usual hot air balloon, if you will, one that goes up faster.
6:57 PM. The churning, roiling motion of this turret was remarkable, almost like time-lapse there was so much of it. That easily seen churning was evidence of how unstable the atmosphere was on this day.  It was unusually cool for summer at 20, 000 feet or so  above us. leading to a strong drop in temperature from the 100 F or so at the ground.   So, as the warmer air that clouds represent relative to their surroundings, made them more buoyant than usual as they climbed upward;  a hotter than usual hot air balloon, if you will, one that goes up faster.  Stronger updrafts are thought to lead to more lightning compared with Cumulonimbus clouds having weak updrafts.
3:57 PM, August 13th. Even slender clouds could shoot up and reach the "glaciation level", and sent long plumes of ice out. The long trail of ice shows how much the wind increased with height at the top of this cloud. As that evening's storm approached, all of the anvils from the many Cumulonimbus clouds were mostly kept from view so that you couldn't see them.
3:57 PM, August 13th. Even slender clouds could shoot up and reach the “glaciation level” where the tops became comprised of only ice crystals,  and sent long plumes of ice out from the parent cloud. The long trail of ice shows how much the wind increased with height at the top of this cloud. As that evening’s storm approached, all of the anvils from the many Cumulonimbus clouds that were approaching were mostly kept from view so that you couldn’t see them.  This cloud also poses a naming enigma.  Its got an ice plume, a very little rain fell out on the left side where Pusch Ridge begins, but no shaft is visible.  It can hardly be called just a “Cumulus” cloud, and yet the more accurate label, “Cumulonimbus” with all of its attributes, makes one a little uncomfortable due to the lack of a visible shaft.

 

The End (of the cloud discussion)

New “not pubbed” item:

I’ve added RViewpoint_10-24-06_submitted date Aug 31, 2006_final, something that’s been sitting around for years!   Spent a lot of time writing it, but ultimately deemed it a hopeless task that it would be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteor.  Soc. under then current leadership in the weather modification domain of that journal, and ultimately never bothered to submit it.  I was sick of the conflict, for one thing.   Haven’t read this piece in years, either, but just wanted to do SOMETHING with it so here it is on this blog.

A longer piece, “Cloud Seeding and the Journal Barriers to Faulty Claims:  Closing the Gaps“, also worked on again in spare time at home, for about two years, with the final rejection in 1999 under pretty much the same Bulletin editorial leadership.  In this MS, I had a chance to get in, but the specific reviewer whose demands the Editor said I had to meet, insisted that I indicate in the manuscript that the lead scientists in the faulty published reports I wrote about “did the best they could under the circumstances” in the  two early benchmark experiments, those in Colorado and Israel.  I knew from direct personal experience that wasn’t true;  I couldn’t write such a bogus statement that might have made the difference in “getting in.”  So two years of on and off effort went down the drain.  Sometime soon I will add this second futile effort to the “not pubbed” list!  I have a number of those…..  It didn’t help either that the two leading scientists whose work I questioned were also the two most beloved scientists in this field.

As with all but one of these pubs (Hobbs and Rangno 1978) in the domain of weather modification, they were done at home, outside of grant funding work while I was at the University of Washington in the Cloud and Aerosol Research Group.  And, as I sometimes alert audiences to, working at home on stuff year after year. thousands of hours involved,  could be considered a “crackpot alert”.  Well, I think of myself as a “good crackpot.”  haha.

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.