Friends, arriving this afternoon from Seattle for a sunny and warm couple of vacation days, will find that Catalina weather today is exactly like the weather they left in Seattle; poor Tommy and Patty.
Clouds will fill in as the day goes on, becoming pretty cloudy at times, especially in the afternoon hours. They will starting to ice up, too, and you know what that means; they’ll produce virga and light showers in the area, with breezes and a high of only in the low 50s.
Be sure to record the first sighting of ice in clouds today. Will be a nice test for you, and a great ob in your cloud diary.
Still expecting a pretty major storm next week.
Got 0.12 inches in the gauge last evening.
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In the meantime, meet members of the former Cloud and Aerosol Research Group at the University of Washington, Professor Peter V. Hobbs, director.
Tom, who arrives today from Seattle, was our group’s software engineer at the University of Washington. He was kind of recluse we learned after he was hired. Liked to have a lot of high vegetation around his desk in our lab where me and a grad student worked. However, unlike a prior software engineer, who was also brilliant like Tom, Tom really never fell asleep at his desk that we know of.
Our first software engineer was Doug, shown meditating below.He was great! Worked long hours that often took their toll in the daytime.
But, not to demean “Doug” whatsoever, who truly WAS brilliant, and his software helped enormously to grease the wheel of our group’s aircraft data analyses, and who also made a lot of money when he joined the then fledgeling Microsoft in the early 1980s, took his job especially seriously, He liked to let people know how seriously, and exactly how much he loved working with computers. And he dressed to show it.
Cloud and Aerosol Researcher, “Stan”, monitoring cloud particle data on a flight over the Washington coastal waters.
It was a fact, that as I got embedded into perhaps the best Atmospheric Science Department in the world, I also learned that science draws “unusual”, maybe even quirky folk, and “meditating” while on the job, perhaps “awaking” with new, substantive realizations of relationships, or ways of presenting data, was pretty common, not just with Doug:
But there were other quirky characteristics that turned up, like “Germophobe John”, shown below, who actually shared my lab room for many years:
Then there was that one guy who worked as part of the flight crew who specialized in looking like John Denver, and liked to come in to work in the morning and report that someone on the bus he rode thought he was John Denver. Seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of that, which in retrospect is kind of sad when you think about it.
Me? I was pretty normal, really not too much affected by the various quirky people around me. From those halcyon days, a selfie:
There was some thought, however, that any quirkiness that was exhibited in our personnel might have been due to the various cancer-causing chemicals we worked with, one of which was Formvar, used to capture images of ice crystals that would hit the liquid Formvar on movie film rotating in the arm of a probe that stuck out of a pod, or a glass slide that stuck out a hole on a stick in the plane. In both cases, the crystal would hit the liquid Formvar, which would dry VERY fast, and then the impression of the crystal would be left in the plastic Formvar.
Below, “Diana”, and “Brad”, a brilliant grad student, at least before he started working with Formvar, examine a jar of the smelly stuff.
Yesterday’s clouds
3:53 PM. This was about an hour before virga and falling snow began to obscure the tops of Samaniego Ridge and Mt. Ms. Lemmon. Here the streaks, crespuscular rays, are NOT caused by precip, but rather dust
Some additional scenes from a 4 h yesterday into the Sam Ridge foothills:
Stuck here, might reached a limit, can’t seem to add photos, and there are too many already.
The End
