First, you should always begin your day, not with the breakfast of champions, but by reviewing the prior day’s clouds in the University of Arizona time lapse movie. Here’s what you will see:
Lots of Cirrus, varies species, Altocumulus, Cirrocumulus, a high temperature contrail go through some Cirrocumulus just after 4 PM, and flocks of medium-sized Cumulus clouds emitting ice.
First, one interesting, but inexplicable Cirrus scene. I know you were likely going to ask Mr. Cloud Maven Person, “Hey, what gives here?” I get a lot of calls like that1.
1:15 PM. That tuft of Cirrus on the right seems to have trails of ice falling out then coming together, almost like they missed each other and want to be together as snow trails until evaporating away. There is no explanation for this2 so I will next post a distraction. (Remember, when you can’t explain something, and this is a life hint, you can either talk around the question without answering it, beginning with, “I’m glad you asked me that question…..” when you’re lying and really NOT glad, or launch a distraction. Here, we launch a distraction.
“I don’t know how that happened; let look at a flower instead”:
Seen yesterday morning on a dog walk, evening primrose. Pretty restful image; problems gone…
In the meantime, after being flustered over a cloud in the early afternoon, those Cumulus clouds aroiund, only two or three thousand feet thick were beginning to snow away, first way off to the south of us, then downstream of the Cat2 Mountains.
Here is the rest of your interesting and learningful cloud day yesterday:
7:17 AM. Riff of Altocumulus castellanus/floccus to the north. Remember in Cloud Maven’s Person’s poster-sized cloud chart it says when you see this cloud it could rain in 6 to 196 hours, as it does for all the cloud formations in it.7:18 AM. Iridescence in a patch of Cirrocumulus, indicating that the droplets comprising it were very tiny, less than 10 or so microns in diameter (one tenth the diameter of a human hair). It could rain in 6 to 196 hours when you see this cloud….9:43 AM. Cirrus, various species/varieties overspread the sky. Blockage of some Cirrus here by a bird of some kind, lower center.
Moving ahead…..
1:14 PM. The cloud-maven cloud indicator blimp was positioned to draw your attention to some building Cumulus clouds southwest of us. No ice evident, but was soon after this shot.
2:47 PM. Cumulus complex shows no ice, but its up there inside, as you would have known from looking at other similar-sized clouds.3:02 PM. “Droop, there it is!” Virga, there it is, drooping out just below the farthest cloud bottom downwind end of this cloud stream.3:17 PM. Virga’s pretty obvious now (above that protruding tree in the distance. Cloud that produced this virga likely no thicker than the white backed one at the start of the cloud stream, etimated depth, 2000-3000 feet. Bases, however, were about -8 to -10 C (18-14 F)! Tops, of clouds even that shallow, were really COLD, maybe to -15 to -20 C (down to 4 F)! But you would have guessed this anyway based on the amount of ice coming out of such shallow clouds. Sorry to insult your Cloud Maven Junior intelligence..3:23 PM. Getting excited here so zoomed in for you. A sprinkle of rain was likely reaching the ground. Here you can see how cold the cloud bases were since that whiteness in the shaft is snow. Where it has completely melted into rain drops is where the bottom of that whiteness ends, The freezing level is typically about a thousand feet higher than where than whiteness ends below cloud base in steady, not too heavy precip, which is what we have here. Small clouds can’t precip too much. That snow is hanging down about 3,000 feet.4:34 PM. A streamer of shallow clouds forming ice heads out from the south toward Oro Valley from Tucson. Estimated depth, 2000-3000 feet is all.4:34 PM. Zoomed view of some of the ice in this cloud with an education module inserted into the photo, wrecking it some. Concentrations here likely around 1 per liter of ice crystals. If depth correct, the crystal habit will be stellars (“Christmas card” crystals) and dendrites, ones that form between -13 C and -18 C.The TUS balloon sounding (AKA, rawinsonde for technophiles) launched around 3:30 PM AST yesterday afternoon (from IPS MeteoStar). Sounding calculates a cloud base of about -9 C, at about 10,000 feet above the ground (over Catalina). That is cold! Cloud base is just about where the two lines come together at the bottom.5:46 PM. Mock sun or parhelia; couldn’t tell if is was due to the lower ice cloud, or a Cirrus way above. Caused by hexagonal (six-sided) plate-like crystals falling face down. What a great optical phenomena day it was for you, starting out with a nice iridescence!6:25 PM. Sunset photos continue to get later and later. These shallow clouds continued to produce virga into the evening hours.
There’s still water in the Sutherland Wash. Its been running now since the end of January! Amazing.
The End
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1FYI, this is a lie.
2I suppose someone could posit that “Dark Magic”, oops, “Dark Energy” may have caused those trails to “come together over me” , by Lennon and McCartney. “Dark Magic”, OOPs. “Dark Energy”, dammitall, is invoked to explain a lot of impossible things, like how the Universe blew up from something smaller than the head of a pin (!) and was 200 million light YEARS across in the tiniest fraction of a ONE second. Clearly impossible without magic, oops, Dark Energy. This impossibility was deduced on cosmic microwave radiation measurements at the farthest edges of the Universe as we know it.
However, instead of checking their measurements, cosmos (not Cosmos Topper of early movie fame with Carey Grant, but cosmos scientists that study the cosmos invented Dark Magic, oops, Dark Energy, dammitall again, to explain how something that’s impossible happened.
Recently, cosmos scientists retracted that finding and said their measurements in retrospect were likely compromised by cosmos dust. How funny izzat? Sure, I am a weather man and make a LOT of errors myself, but that cosmos one is pretty big.
Just kidding, cosmos guys, the cosmos is tough. Science mag reported that only 4 % of the visible Univserse is made up of known stuff, 96% (gasp) is made up of Dark Matter (23%), and 73%, of “Dark Magic”, oops again, “Dark Energy”, that stuff that is still thought to be behind the increasingly rapid expansion of the Universe3. That is, 96% of the Universe is composed of stuff we’re clueless about.
3It was originally posited that the expansion of the Universe should be slowing down until around the 1990s, when measurements indicated it was speeding up. Hmmmmm. Will there be a retraction of that claim, too, in our future? Stand by for more measurements. Just kidding, cosmos guys. Try being a weatherman….
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.
