Addendum on beer
BTW, if you’re still interested in beer and clouds after yesterday’s blog about CIrrus being “on tap”, get this book:
Clouds in a Glass of Beer: Simple Experiments in Atmospheric Physics, Dover Publications, by Professor Craig Bohren. In spite of having an interest in beer or perhaps because of it, he is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at Penn State University, one of the leading party schools in America. Writes about optics, too, a real atmo optician. Kidding aside, his book above is one of the best you can get on how the atmo works and has been popular for decades; was updated in 2001.
I forgot about it, darn, but added it to yesterday’s blog to “go with the theme….”
Yesterday and today
Nothin’ but filmy Cirrus clouds yesterday enhancing the skies over Catalina. Here’s are two examples. BTW, if you were really noticing, they tended to be thicker and more widespread to the north, as in the second photo, closer to the main jet stream up thataway.
Same stream of moist air at high levels continues over us, but, what happens over time with these high level streams of moist air? They tend to lower in height as time goes by. Here’s the stream in
this loop from the U of WA Huskies Weather Dept.
So, today, we’ll likely see some mid-level droplet clouds, not all ice clouds like Cirrus ones of yesterday, and because its relatively warm up top, those droplet clouds tend to be turreted, i. e., Altocumulus castellanus (has a base) and floccus (base is evaporating upward). Both types indicate the same thing, really, that the atmosphere is a little “unstable” up there; updrafts are easily produced when the cloud forms and a little heat is released in the condensation process.
It looks, too, like those Altocumulus clouds will be around with the Cirrus at at sunset today, and you know what that means: lots of color so charge those camera batteries, cross fingers. Could be especially spectacular.
Cal-AZ storm update
The long, and confidently predicted (think spaghetti here) and unusually strong trough and storm for April 12th is still in the cards for Cal. AZ pcpn, though plentiful for April over a couple of days in the north, may not reach us here in Catalina, and if so, will be minimal it now appears, maybe a few hundredths. Look for dusty breezes for sure after the 12th. Check this loop out for all the details, again from the Huskies.
The End
