Cloud watchers

I've always had a fascination for the weather.  Especially violent weather; if I hadn't become a mild-mannered high school biology teacher, I'd have been a tornado chaser.  One of my favorite movies is Twister, and yes, I'm well aware of how ridiculous it is, but still.  Who didn't cheer when the Bad Meteorologist got smashed to smithereens, and the Good Meteorologist and his wife survived and decided they were still in love?

*looks around*

*silence*

Okay, maybe it was just me.  But still.  There's something compelling about weather, which is why I frequently give my wife urgently-needed updates about frontal systems in South Dakota.  Like everyone does, right?

*looks around*

*silence*

Anyhow, having been a weather-watcher for years, I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out that recently, the powers-that-be in the meteorological world have added twelve new types of clouds to the International Cloud Atlas.  Which is a book I didn't even know existed.  I mean, I've known since I was a kid and got a copy of The Golden Guide to Weather that there were different sorts of clouds, classed by height, shape, density, and pattern (if any) -- with wonderful names like altostratus and cirrus and mammatocumulus.  It honestly never occurred to me, though, that there was an entire atlas devoted to them, much less that there might be new ones.  After all, people have been watching the skies for millennia, not to mention describing it and drawing pictures of it.  How could they see anything truly new?

Well, it turns out that some of the new ones only form under really specific conditions.  Take, for example, one of the newly-classified cloud types, named cavum, sometimes known as a "hole-punch cloud" or a "fallstreak hole."  This occurs in an altocumulus cloud bank, when something causes sudden evaporation in a region, leaving behind a hole through which you can see the blue sky.  It's sometimes triggered by an airplane or even a meteor.

A cavum formation in Austria in 2008 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons H. Raab (User:Vesta), HolePunchCloud, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Another is the volutus, or "roll cloud," often associated with windy weather near bodies of water, and thought to be caused by a soliton wave -- a single, stable standing wave front:

A volutus cloud, Punta del Este, Maldonado, Uruguay, 2009 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Daniela Mirner Eberl, Roll-cloud, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Another new one is the murus cloud, or "wall cloud."  Although this one has been seen many times, especially if you live in the midwestern United States, it just recently received its own nomenclature.  It's a part of a cumulonimbus formation -- the kind of cloud that gives rise to thunderstorms and tornadoes -- and results from an abrupt lowering of the cloud base.  This indicates the area of strongest updraft, which is why murus clouds are a good indication that it's time to head to the storm cellar.

A murus cloud near Miami, Texas, 1980 [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration]

One last one is the asperitas formation, which has an undulating, underwater appearance.  While they look threatening, they're more often seen after a thunderstorm has passed, and usually dissipate quickly without any further violent weather.

Asperitas clouds over Talinn, Estonia, 2009 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ave Maria Mõistlik, Beautiful clouds, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Anyhow, I was really surprised to hear that those only recently got their own official classification.  I guess it just goes to show that there is still a lot to be learned from the things we look at every day.  Speaking of which, it's time for me to check the NOAA forecast site and see about those frontal systems in South Dakota.  Carol is waiting for her update.  You know how it goes.

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Dark clouds

I still remember when I was about twenty years old, and I first heard about Carl Sagan's proposal to terraform Venus.

On first glance, this is a crazy idea.  Venus brings new meaning to the word "inhospitable."  Its average surface temperature is 462 C.  The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which is denser than Earth's air, so the pressures at the surface are immense.  (It's the density and composition of the atmosphere that's why early photographs taken by probes on Venus's surface looked warped, as if the probe were sitting at the base of a bowl; the refraction of what light makes it to the surface caused optical distortion.)  If being inside a pressure cooker isn't bad enough, its dense clouds are largely composed of sulfuric acid.

As Sagan himself said, "Venus is very much like hell."

But Sagan was an amazingly creative thinker, and he came up with a proposal for reworking the atmosphere and, possibly, making it livable for Earthlings.  He suggested detonating a rocket carrying a cargo of cyanobacteria in its upper atmosphere, dispersing them into the clouds.  Cyanobacteria are primitive photosynthetic single-celled life forms, and Sagan's idea was that the updrafts would keep at least some of them aloft.  As they tumbled about in the (relatively) temperate clouds, they'd photosynthesize, consuming some of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen gas as a waste product.

The idea is that the aerial microbes would multiply, and although some would inevitably sink low enough to fry, enough would stay up in the clouds to steadily drop the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.  Less carbon dioxide, less greenhouse effect; less greenhouse effect, lower temperature.  Once the cloud temperature dropped below 100 C, water vapor would condense, and it would rain out the sulfuric acid.

Far-fetched, perhaps, especially for its time.  But it was an exciting enough proposal that I recall discussing it eagerly with my college friends and fellow science nerds.

This all comes up because of a peculiar observation of Venus made recently, by teams at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.  What they've seen is that there are clouds of "unknown absorbers" darkening the upper atmosphere of the planet in patches -- enough to affect the weather.

A composite image of theVenus, using data from the Japanese probe Akatsuki.  [Image courtesy of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency]

And there are astronomers who think these "unknown absorbers" are not the products of exotic Venusian chemical reactions -- but are airborne single-celled life forms.

"It is hard to conceive of what would cause a change in the [planet's] albedo without a change in the absorbers," said Sanjay Limaye, planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of a paper last week in The Astronomical Journal that seriously considered the possibility of the absorbers being life forms.  "Since there are few species which have physical, chemical and spectral properties that are consistent with the composition of the Venus clouds, they may have evolved independently on Venus."

The researchers are up front that extraterrestrial microbes are just one possible explanation of the peculiar darkening of the skies, which occurs with an odd periodicity along with an overall decrease in albedo since measurements started in 2006.  It may turn out to be simply a chemical reaction -- still the most likely explanation for the gas output from search-for-life experiments by the Mars landers -- but the fact that scientists are even considering the microbe hypothesis is encouraging and exciting.

Whichever it turns out to be, it seems fitting to end with another quote by Sagan: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Hey, you, get offa my cloud

Along Cayuga Lake, near where I live, is Milliken Station Power Plant.  On cool days its smokestack can be seen topped with a plume of steam.   Nearby is Portland Point, a renowned Devonian fossil-collecting site.

It was the fossils that brought a ninth-grade Earth Science class there, some years ago, which I had been asked to help chaperone.  The kids were all happily mucking around in the shale, looking for fossils, when one young lady -- who was known not to be overendowed with brains -- looked over at the nearby power plant smokestack, and said, wonder in her voice, "So that's where clouds come from!"

There are times when my natural compassion and my tendency to guffaw at people who say stupid things do war with each other.  I think I didn't laugh at her, but it was an effort.

But lest you think that this lack of understanding about concepts like "water vapor" and "condensation" is limited to this long-ago student, allow me to introduce you to Diane Tessman.  Now, Diane doesn't think, as our student did, that clouds are manufactured in Ithaca, New York and then exported all over the world.  No, that would be ridiculous.

Diane Tessman believes clouds are manufactured by UFOs as camouflage.

At first, I thought her claims were a joke, intended to make fun of the whole UFO/alien coverup crowd.  Sadly, it is not.  She has written an entire article in which she describes how alien spacecraft produce clouds to hide within or behind.  These are not oddly-shaped clouds, Ms. Tessman says; no, they are ordinary, puffy white cumulus clouds, because hiding behind an oddly-shaped cloud would call attention to the UFO instead of hiding it.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Jastremski and the Wikimedia Commons]

By this point, you're probably asking yourself: if they don't look any different, how can I tell a UFO cloud from a regular cloud?  Answer: you can't.  You just have to watch a bunch of clouds, and wait until the camouflage slips and you see a UFO.

It's kind of an odd camouflage, when you think about it.  Picture yourself as the alien captain, on a mission to conquer Earth, and there you are, sitting inside a cloud, just drifting along with the other, non-UFO-generated clouds.  You can't change direction or speed, because it's not like the cloud is going to come along with you.  It means that whatever your mission was intended to accomplish, you'd better hope that it was downwind of your current position, and not needing attention any time soon:

Alien First Officer:  Captain!  We're off course!  We're supposed to be bombing New York City, and we're drifting the wrong direction! 

Alien Captain:  *slams fist into his palm*  Drat!  There's nothing we can do about it!  We've got to stay inside this cloud, and the wind is blowing the wrong way!  Where can we float over and bomb into rubble? 

Alien First Officer: "On this course, our next possible target is..." *consults map* "...Newark." 

Alien Captain:  Dammit!  That won't do!  No one will be able to tell!

Of course, Ms. Tessman says, we also have to consider the possibility that clouds may not just be camouflage; it's possible that clouds are naturally generated by "dimensional travel."

Whatever that means.

The whole thing is kind of spooky, isn't it? How many times have we had nice picnics on beautiful summer days, and lain on blankets looking up at the peaceful white clouds sailing by?  Now, you have to wonder how many of those clouds hid evil aliens, spying on us, waiting until we fall asleep so they can steal the oatmeal-raisin cookies we brought for dessert.

At this point, some of you may be questioning Ms. Tessman's credentials.  If so, they're provided at the end of the article.  She states that she is a former public school teacher; one can only hope that her subject wasn't physics.  She participated in many projects with MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), and after many years discovered that she had a personal reason for her interest; while under hypnosis, she discovered that as a child she had been visited by, and had "shared consciousness with," an alien being called "Tibus."  Tibus has apparently provided her with such vital information as the fact that hurricanes are dangerous and it's a problem when a nuclear power plant explodes.  Considering Katrina and the meltdown at Fukushima, I think we can definitely all agree that Tibus knows what he's talking about.

But mainly, I'm glad that we now have an explanation for clouds other than Milliken Station Power Plant.  Because frankly, given the demand for clouds in places like the Amazon Rain Forest, it's been hard for Milliken Station to keep up with production quotas.  It's a relief to know that all we have to do is to send some UFOs down there to do "dimensional travel," and there will be clouds aplenty.

Heavy weather

I find it puzzling how few people actually understand weather.

Partly, this puzzlement is because I've always found it completely fascinating.  I spend a lot of time on Weather Underground and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sites, with the result that I frequently update my wife on the status of weather systems in Nebraska.  (Her stock response: "That's nice, dear.")

I cannot, for example, fathom how people wouldn't be intensely curious about videos like the recent time-lapse series taken of a supercell system in Wyoming, which all of you should watch right now:

What surprises me is how few people get beyond the "Oh, wow," stage with all of this.  I know that the first time I saw a photograph of a supercell -- which ranks right up there with a dry microburst as the most bizarre weather phenomenon I've ever heard of -- I immediately thought, "What could cause something like that?"  And asking this question led me to all sorts of cool places, like atmospheric convection and adiabatic cooling and evaporative cooling and wind shear.

Now I realize that this stuff gets complex fast.  To quote Garrison Keillor, "Intelligence is like four-wheel drive.  It enables you to get stuck in even more remote places."

But it's still awesome.  And weather is, after all, ubiquitous.  How you could be immersed in something all the time, and not want to know how it works, is mystifying to me.

All of this comes up because of two stories this week, both of which never would have been more than meteorological curiosities if it weren't for the fact that people tend not to know much about the weather phenomena that surround them all day, every day.  The first, which involves an admittedly odd cloud pattern called a "hole-punch cloud," or "fallstreak hole," had people speculating that the seeming "hole in the sky" (check the link for photographs) was one of the following:

1. A wormhole.
2. A flaw in the Matrix.
3. A sign that we're all living inside some kind of self-contained dome, à la The Truman Show, and the hole was sort of like the can light that fell out of the sky at the beginning of the movie.
4. A gap through which an angel was about to arrive.  Why an angel couldn't just come through the clouds without there being a hole, given that clouds are basically big blobs of fog, I don't know.
5. A portal to a different dimension.

Of course, all of the furor was founded on the fact that hole-punch clouds have a perfectly natural explanation, usually that an airplane (or, much less commonly, a meteor) disrupted what was uniform cloud cover, leaving a temporary hole through the clouds.

No Matrix, wormhole, or angels required.

Second, we had a story from the wonderful site Doubtful News that blamed the unusual (and destructive) rains that have hit Serbia in the past week on none other than...

... HAARP.

Yes, we have not seen the last of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, that favorite bête noire of conspiracy theorists -- despite the fact that HAARP closed last year and is currently being dismantled.  It's been blamed for everything from tsunamis to earthquakes to tornadoes to hurricanes, and now... floods:

Many of my contacts in Serbia have spoken of whispered accusations that the unprecedented flooding and unusual weather patterns in the last few years have something to do with the US’s HAARP system. According to one website: “A Serbian journalist was advised not to write about a HAARP installation near Belgrade. After series of texts regarding HAARP antenna system near Barajevo (Belgrade municipality) and application of this ELF system in Serbia the journalist of newspaper Pravda has received a phone call on Monday evening around 10PM from unlisted phone number. The voice on other side of the line gave the journalist a “friendly advice” to stop writing on HAARP...” 

Would it be surprising if the US, after unleashing neo-Nazis in Ukraine, unleashed flooding in Serbia? Those in the know would probably say no.

 And there's a reason for that, you know?  Like the fact that HAARP couldn't even cause floods when it was running, much less now, when it isn't?

Of course, every time there's a catastrophe, people want an Explanation, not just an explanation.  It's not enough just to talk about weather systems and frontal boundaries and atmospheric moisture; there's got to be more.

But dammit, it'd be nice if people would start with the weather systems and frontal boundaries, rather than starting from ignorance and going downhill from there.  If you want to comment intelligently on anything, it helps to know some of the science behind it first.

Okay, I'll calm down, now.  Back to my happy place.  NOAA.  I see that there's a low-pressure center over Manitoba at the moment.  Isn't that cool?  Isn't it?

That's nice, dear.