Backyard Skies

Under your roof, it's always overcast.

  No matter how many CFL or standard light bulbs you switch on, it's going to be gloomy in your home. Your roof can turn even a gorgeous day like yesterday into a dim, gray affair--one that drives you to the Internet looking for vacation deals in Hawaii, San Diego, Tuscon, anywhere but the Pacific Northwest. The remedy? Get outside. 

Eschew the shingles! Look at these gorgeous virga! These are ice crystals, 10,000 feet up, floating in the sky.

Did anyone notice how peachy the sky was Friday morning? Or were you just whining about the clouds?

What a lovely ceiling of clouds over Budd Inlet! I am not certain, but I believe these are altostratus clouds lowering rapidly to become nimbostratus clouds--the rain clouds. Think how much Pacific Ocean is in these clouds.

This photo was not taken at an arboretum, but at the local dog park just minutes before the rain started on Friday. These are nimbostratus clouds. Isn't the gray a perfect backdrop for the foliage? You know it is.

  Even if it's pouring all weekend, make sure you layer on your gear and take a walk.The rain that sounds like torrents on the roof of your house sounds wonderful in the woods dripping on the big-leaf maples. The rain that pounds on your metal car roof appears as rooster-tails on the highway, and makes driving hazardous, falls gently on the grass, on the path, on the field. Find yourself a nice pervious surface and listen to the rain soak in.
  

Cloud of the Week #6: Altostratus translucidis--boring?

Altostratus translucidis looking good at sunset behind the Washington State capitol dome.

  Now that we've moved a bit lower in the troposphere to the mid-level clouds (the fantastic new altocumulus asperatus cloud type!), I thought I would brighten up everyone's screen/life with some warm glowing sunsets courtesy of our Cloud of the Week #6--altostratus translucidis.  

  Though "alto" means "high," in meteorological circles it means "middle." So this Altostratus, typically forms at altitudes of 6,500 ft. to 23,000 feet. It assumes the basic form of a layer "stratus," and is therefore altostratus. There are four varieties of altostratus; this is the one that is thin enough (translucent) to show the position of the sun...even though it has just set.

Photo of altostratus sunset over Bellingham Bay, courtesy W.P Ruth

  Though you wouldn't know it from this photograph, altostratus is known among the cloud-spotting cognoscenti as the "boring cloud." In the middle of the day, these clouds do nothing photogenic or uplifting. They appear gray to bluish-gray and are often thick (thousands of feet thick) and extensive (several thousands of square miles).    Altostratus are composed of both ice crystals and water droplets and so diffuse light in a manner similar to ground glass. If you think you are looking up at altostratus, but see your shadow on the ground, you're probably looking at a higher, thinner could--cirrostratus.
    I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I went rummaging through my files of cloud photographs and found none of altostratus by day. I have thousands of photographs of beautiful clouds, but now I will have to start collecting photographs of boring ones, too.
 

  Next Up:  The Accidental Naturalist reviews O'er the Land.