
Photos of yesterday’s patterns
I could literally hear the cameras clicking all over Catalina and Oro Valley as these patterns showed up, moving in from the southwest as the increasing numbers of cloud-centric folk lost control of themselves. Reflecting that general loss of control, which affected yours truly, too many photos will be posted here. Below holey clouds with icy centers, but not ones caused by aircraft:
And look closely at the fine patterns, lines and granulations in these shots! Truly mesmerizing.
But what’s missing in this photo above? There was no iridescence seen around the sun where we normally look for it suggesting that those Cirrocumulus clouds nearest the sun were composed of ice crystals, and not tiny droplets. Iridescence is rarely seen next to the sun due to ice crystals because they are usually the result of the freezing of existing droplets, that then grow rapidly as ice particles to sizes too large to produce diffraction phenomenon close to the sun. Where’s my Lear jet, so’s I can confirm these speculations?!! I would very much like to have one on “stand by”, in case I think of something. Below, a wonderful example of no iridescence even though newly formed clouds are by the sun:

A jet runs through it
Or so I thought. In this chapter of cloud-maven.com, we inspect the photos of a commercial jet flying at or near the level of these clouds and determine what happened. I was quite excited to see this happen because we would now determine whether there were any liquid droplets in what to the eye of the amateur cloud watching person would be a liquid droplet Altocumulus clouds. Here the size of the elements are just a bit too large to lump it into the Cirrocumulus category, if you care. So, with heart pounding, took this sequence of photos:

Let is go zooming:




By the way, if you caught it, there were a couple of standard, aircraft-produced, “hole punch” clouds at the very upwind, formative portion of this patch of clouds before it got here. These photos pretty much prove that the Cc at the formative end at that time was composed of highly supercooled droplets and that the passage of an aircraft produced ice, that caused a fall out hole.

The End–quite enough, eh?