Clouds by Bus

  Determined to kick the car habit, I decided to take the Intercity Transit bus to Tacoma Tuesday to meet a friend at the Tacoma Art Museum and have lunch. I knew the bus would double the transportation time, but I was looking forward to reading on the bus...and looking at clouds without endangering the lives of other motorists.

  I left my house at 9:35 a.m. in the pouring rain to catch a bus downtown where I had a half-hour layover before catching the #603 to Tacoma. I spent it at the Bread Peddler eating a piece of marionberry pie. Everything was going really well so far.

  The bus left at 10:30 and I started reading the very wonderful and engrossing Generosity by Richard Powers. I was happy not to be driving--the rain and the spray from cars and trucks would have been nerve-wracking. About 20 minutes into the ride, I realized I didn't know exactly how close the bus stopped to the museum. In fact, I wasn't really sure where the museum was, but knew it was downtown. I could either get off at one of the downtown stops, or confess to the bus driver that I had left home that morning without figuring out exactly where I was going. It sounded like an existential crisis moment, so I just kept reading. I'd wing it in Tacoma.

   I got off on Commerce Street and ducked into a coffee shop to ask where the museum was. The barista pointed north. I arrived one half block later only to discover the museum was closed on Tuesdays. I called my friend to tell her to meet me at the Museum of Glass instead. I crossed the fabulous Chihuly bridge (my umbrella getting blown inside out) and down the spiral stairs (my feet getting soaked)...only to find that museum closed on Tuesdays as well. Another phone call, another crossing of the bridge to the Museum of Washington State History where I had never been. Guess what? 

   My friend picked me up in her car and we found ourselves in a cozy Mexican restaurant across town. After a wonderful three-hour conversation, I returned to Commerce Street to pick up the Olympia bound bus at 2:54. At 2:53, I watched my bus pull up to the stop and then pull away without every stopping.

   "You've got to be really aggressive," someone suggested.

    The next bus was due in 15 minutes. While I waited I made plans to stand in the street in my bright-orange raincoat in 10 minutes. So what if my foot got run over.

    It did not. Luckily there was a crowd of aggressive bus riders at the stop with me.

    I had about an hour's ride home, so I folded up my umbrella and took out my book. Around Fort Lewis, the sun came out. And then my camera. The I-5 is a really great vantage point for cloud watching because there are no trees and no telephone poles. But there is the issue of shooting through a window and being in motion...which is how come I only have one good photo to post (below).

   I returned home, approximately 8 hours after I left..and then I was back out to catch the sunset in downtown Olympia (below). This red sky at night did in fact portend a delightful day on Wednesday.

  NOTE: Should you want to duplicate my fabulous bus experience, click here Intercity Transit for routes and schedules. But remember, the three museums in Tacoma are closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Fog Blog

What a glorious spate of weather, so beautiful that it is almost heartbreaking. After our unremarkable summer, every moment of these autumn days presents something to write home about. For these days, I believe, we have the fog to thank. October, according to meteorologist Cliff Mass, is the foggiest month in Olympia. To celebrate, I am posting this fog blog--some photos, some science, some encouragement to trying to enjoy the lack of horizontal visibility that this type of stratus clouds brings to the landscape.

Last September, as my devoted readers may recall, I went swimming in the fog early one morning when Ward Lake was all but invisible. This year, the scene was the same (above), but I decided to photograph the fog moving over the city rather than swim in what was hanging over the lake. So I went up to Overlook Park in Tumwater with my camera. A water tower (below) marks the hilltop location of the park; this is the only time I have ever seen the color of the sky match the "camouflaging" paint color of the water tower. This is the view to the south.southeast. 

And this (below) is the view to the north./northeast Just to the right of the large tree is the ghostly capitol dome. . The fog was rolling in from the northwest. The photo below was taken at 12:15 p.m

 

This one at 12: 39 p.m.

This one at 12: 48 p.m.

  

And this one at 1:03 p.m.

   Fog is precipitation, formed of tiny water droplets, that takes the form of a stratus cloud--one that is in contact with the ground and that reduces horizontal visibility to less than 1/4 mile (1 km). If you went outside early in the morning this week, when the fog was the densest, you could see the individual droplets of the fog and watch them moving and swirling and falling.

   There are many types of fog--ground fog, ice fog, frozen fog, freezing fog, fog smoke, sea fog, Arctic sea smoke, Bora fog, steam fog, valley fog, caribou fog (caused by warm exhalations of herds of caribou!), frontal fog, upslope fog, advection fog, and radiation fog. I could go on...

   But let's talk about radiation fog. This is what we are experiencing in Olympia now. This type of fog forms on clear, cool  nights (you have been seeing the stars and moon, right?) and usually after a sunny day during which the ground absorbs the solar heat. At night, that heat radiates from the ground into the air; the ground cools sharply after this loss. The warm air radiating from the ground comes in contact with the cooler ground. The water vapor in the air condenses and creates visible fog. A whole night of this and the fog builds into a thick layer that rises over the treetops. 

  Why does the fog hover over Ward Lake and other area water bodies? Two reasons. Our lakes are located on low ground and fog, which is heavier that the surrounding air, settles in low spots. And, because Ward Lake itself is radiating it's summer's worth of trapped heat into the surrounding air. I like to imagine the lake's fog as its slow release of summer into the crisp fall air. As long as there is fog on the lake, I know the water is still warmer than the air. In November, the water temperature is closer to the air temperature and the dense fogs are mostly gone.

  Here is a wonderful illustration of radiation fog by my favorite American author-illustrator-meteorologist-painter, Eric Sloane. This is from his 1952 Weather Book (a 2005 Dover reprint). He's my hero.

   And, finally, because I had heard than rain was in the forecast (putting an end to morning fog), I went out my favorite really low spot--the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. I was hoping to find myself wandering around for hours looking for my hand in front of my face, being attacked by Canada Geese I tripped over, or falling blindly off the dike and into the muck but, alas, I was too late for such Accidental Naturalist fun. I did get to enjoy the thick fog hovering over the still-warm waters of McAllister Creek (below) at low tide. The photographs show the long boardwalk (under construction) that will take visitors half mile out into the estuary. Click here for info on the refuge and for news about the new boardwalk opening.

 

"It usually takes a rainbow, a thunderstorm, or some of of atmospheric antic to make us look upward and take note," writes Eric Sloane. "But if that gives us the habit, it is worth while. And I'll wager you will see a lot up there that you never dreamed of."

Between the Tides

A minus 3.2 tide on July 13th turned the beach at Burfoot Park into this shimmering summer tableau (with the help of some cumulus clouds and beachcombers in "photographer's red" shirts). This is the second super-low tide beach visit I've made here in South Sound and I must admit that I have mixed feelings about it. Here, exposed and vulnerable, are a myriad intertidal creatures adapted to survive occasional exposure to the air...and hundreds of trampling feet. Moonsnails, sand dollars, ghost shrimp, sea stars, and hermit crabs were all there for the looking, photographing, poking, prodding, digging, and handling. I loved the sight, last year, of busses of elementary school kids scampering around at low tide, full of glee and curiosity, but is it okay to crush them on our way to learning about them?  

Here (above), the first surge of the incoming tide reaches the beach. The next minus 3.2 tide occurs in 2011.

As if jealous of my attention to what lay at my feet, the sky put on quite a show Of course I aimed my camera upward. But the drama in the sky didn't last for long. The weekend's gray mornings (and early afternoons) made conditions just right for bellyflopping on the dock at Zittel's Marina at high tide (plus 11.1) where bouquets of frilled anemones grow on the pilings and tires (below).

I spent well over two hours gazing at the display of anemones of various sizes and colors (white to bright orange), tube worms, ochre sea stars, nudibranchs, sea cucumbers, comb jellies, and an unfortunate egg yolk jelly. If you look very carefully at the photo below you can see the jelly's tentacles being pulled into the centers (mouths) of the surrounding anemones.

Both the jelly and anemone are members of the phylum Cnidaria (pronounced nye-dare-ee-uh). The anemones are sessile polyps, the jelly's free-swimming medusa. Both are passive predators equipped with tentacles, some containing cells called nematocysts. These cells may contain venom or be barbed or sticky. When they are stimulated--by passing bit of flotsam, zooplankton, or small fish--the nematocysts rapidly uncoil and subdue the prey. The tentacles then maneuver the prey into the anemone's or jelly's mouth.

So, who is preying on whom here? Or is this a case similar to the clown fish and the anemone? Or is the hapless jelly simply stuck in the throat of an overstimulated anemone? Is there some kind of mutualism happening here--both cnidarians feeding off each other's trapped prey? This scene brings to mind the cartoon image of a person unable to let go of an electrical cord that is shocking them. I am sure there is an explanation. I will try to find it.

Reference Point

I posted a cropped version of this photograph here a few days back, but realized later that by cropping out the strip of landscape at the bottom of the scene, you can't get a sense of how large this circumhorizontal arc actually was--or the fact that it didn't really arc. So here are two more photographs and a word of advice to cloudspotters with skyward cameras: include a strip of landscape or cityscape in the bottom 1/4 or 1/3 of your photographs for scale and context.

Next Blog: Psychogenic Lacrimation (aka Emotional Tears) and how they differ from other kinds of tears and what, perhaps, tears have in common with raindrops and condensation nuclei. This is just what happens when you are writing a book on clouds.