About real clouds, weather, cloud seeding and science autobio life stories by WMO consolation prize-winning meteorologist, Art Rangno
Panoply of clouds
You had yer Altocumulus lenticulars, your Altocumulus floccus with virga, some castellanus in there, too, Cirrostratus, Cirrus spissatus, Cirrocumulus with tiny ripples, numerous contrails (not so good), a couple of distant Cumulus humilis, and likely a nice sunset that I didn’t see because we had dinner guests and I couldn’t run out every 45 seconds to see how it was developing as I normally do. So, all in all, it was a pretty satisfying cloud day for you I thought. I was imagining that maybe you might have had some trouble logging all these different types of clouds in your weather diary as I thought about what to write today.
Let’s review them:
Then this fabulous grouping of Altocumulus floccus with a couple of castellanus came marching over Oro Valley! These were great to see with their proud “tails” drooping down, and they tell you where that overhead “Cis spiss” really came from. Yep, it was formerly an Altocumulus!
You can see that this group of Ac floc clouds are not nearly as high as that old, faint contrail far above them stretching from right to left, likely one or more hours old.
More high clouds in route after a clearing this morning.
Lots of intermittent troughiness ahead, and cooler weather with them, especially out around 10 days from now, but sadly, but no rain, mods say.
The End.
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.