I’m talking about your clouds and weather day yesterday, and definitely NOT about someone whom I shall call, “Sharon1“, that happened to me 33 years ago and whose birthday was yesterday, Ground Hog Day, a day commemorated by a 1993 movie about a weatherman. Seemed “right”, too, to be a weatherman with a girlfriend whose birthday was on Ground Hog Day. I loved her so much! Was definitely in the first stage of the psychologist’s lab standard, the Passionate Love Scale2 ; euphoric when things were going right, and also a stage characterized by delusional and obsessive thinking. (Haven’t we all been there at some point?) Had a great sense of humor and playfulness about her, too. As it turned out, though, I wasn’t good enough for her. (I really wasn’t; she was a med student and all that; very brainy, so there was quite a mental contrast.)
Oh, yeah, NOW for the clouds yesterday on a cool day which is what I was talking about to being with; high only 55 F here in the “Heights”:
3:18 PM. Altocumulus perlucidus. What the temperature? In the middle of the photo there’s an ice canal–hoped you logged it in your weather diary. That ice canal was caused by an aircraft passing through a cloud that’s well below freezing. The exact reason for the sudden freezing of drops in that cloud is still being investigated. However, when you see this phenomenon, an ice canal or hole punch cloud, I want you to FIRST think of ME, because our paper on this phenomenon was rejected twice back in the early 1980s before being published, and second, when you see this happen, estimate that the droplet cloud was probably at -20 C (-4 F) or colder. Yes, THAT cold and still composed of droplets! Therefore it produces a buildup of ice on an aircraft when one flies through it, but then the aircraft changes that by converting to ice behind it! How strance is that?. (I deliberately misspelled “strange” to see if anyone has read this far.)
3:19 PM. Frosty the Lemmon. Good sign of rime icing on those trees up there. You see how frosty they look? Likely because of supercooled cloud droplets hitting the trees and freezing during all the low clouds of the previous day. Very pretty.
2:19 PM. “Angel’s hair”, Cirrus fibratus. The delicateness of those striations are amazing when you think that they are traveling in air moving at around 80 mph up there around 30-odd thousand feet above us.
The weather ahead
Can this really happen when such a great trough goes by as later today and tomorrow? Check out our missing rain, being in a rainless “sandwich”, from the U of AZ fabulous Beowulf Cluster run from 11 PM AST just last night, though not so great an output.
Below, the predicted total rain in Arizona as this great trough goes by. NIL in Catalina! The map below is a forecast of all the rain areas and their amounts expected by 2 PM AST tomorrow afternoon. Fortunately, it has been, as in basketball, “rejected.” Read details in caption.
The End. I hope you’re happy now since I have titillated you with a personal story in a cheap attempt to raise blog ratings. Haven’t broke into the top 10 million blogs yet. But maybe if min is more like “Entertainment Tonight”, I make that breakthrough.
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BTW, if you haven’t heard yet: “Seattle Celebrate (sic) SB Win!”, a title and article written by a possible drunken AP writer after the SB, if you’re interested.
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1Defintely NOT a picture of “Sharon”, but its how she MIGHT have looked had she been in my Seattle living room with her son, New Year’s Eve, 1981.
And, of course, I found someone I loved just as much later…
2Don’t believe me that such a thing exists? Read the first column of SCI CLIPPINGS CAUDATE OVER HEELS IN LOVE 001, no less. Probably goes farther in its discussion of these kinds of things than we really want to know about and how they came to know them…be advised.
