Clouds
FEATURING:
- From: A San Juan Journal
- Cloudwatching
I've got to say something about clouds. Cloud watching, nephelogizing, etc. is a full time pre-occupation out here. Especially if you might get your rear-end wet if you don't. And it's natural for me as I'm an astronomer. (I can't use the telescope because of these blinkety-blink clouds!)
Now I'm on my third day of doing this at Missouri Gulch. A constant backdrop eliminates a variable and makes comparisons direct. Frankly, the first day was probably the least as far as the meteorological progenitors go. I remember a few altostratus and nimbus, primarily to the south down the valley's axis. Not really doing much, just decided to titillate a little with some fuchsia and pastel colors at sunset.
Yesterday a very versatile display happened. Of course, there was rain just as I finished pitching the camp at 1 PM. The storm (not a powerful one) broke at about 3, then there were the textbook skies of blue with a few puffy cumuli until about 5, when some large storms in the south and east got nice and brewed. The peripheral skirts or, if you prefer, penumbrae, overlapped overhead, forming a canopy for the valley. The lid was rather unspectacular until sunset. Then, just like a photographer's umbrella, it reflected and diffused the light streaming clearly and freely over Mountainview Crest (about five miles to the west) evenly and indirectly throughout the gulch. A succession of rich saturated colors biased the green forests and pink ridges here: silver, gold, pudding yellow, cadmium, Indian River orange, then suddenly an impure magenta, a dirty fuchsia and an ashen gray. Mt. Aztec with its talus slopes was as perfect a chromic sentinel as possible for this scattered light. That's not all, folks. The southern storm rippled with a violence and texture that made one fear for those beneath it. A chiaroscuro display of great power. (But it turned out to be a wimp.) Finally, Silver Mesa beamed the last direct rays of the sun at my Wallo-centered detectors in a fitting metallic series of colors: from platinum white to a copper-red.
Today has been extremely unstable. Cloudy, misty ridges, rain, drizzle,
hot and blue skies. But the big attraction (no, not her tits!) was the
preprandial thunderstorm. A classic display of August mountain weather,
with a few unusual highlights thrown in. The first signs went unseen, either
because of commonness or blockage from view by ridges. The cumulus stage.
Yet when the sharp edges of the swollen piles topped the valley crest,
it was evident that here was a rain producer. By fifteen minutes later,
a telltale gloomy, gunmetal color gave away the height of the cloud; it
would mature to a cumulo-nimbus.
The next question answered by observation was drift. East. Over my valley. Growth covered the skies first and motion brought the highest part of the cloud overhead. Shades of gray said, "Chicago Basin and Mt. Aztec will get it worse than you will." Mists of downfalling water covered both.
Lightning was easily visible against its underillumined parents of earth and sky and its sounds grew crisper, more powerful and more complex as the maelstrom came on. Macrotortuous segments--hundreds of meters long--were heard first as a dull rumble produced from three to ten miles distant. More proximate bolts added the sharp clacking of mesotortuous parts of the spark ten to one hundred meters in length. Only the nearest bolts--those less than a mile away--had the clarion, sky-ripping crash of the ten-meter-scale micro segments. When you hear these, you're too close for comfort, buddy! Fortunately there were only one or two of these sparklers at my topos.
One surprise was a unique echo caused by a bolt west and behind the valley wall. An incredible reverberation that was like a drawn-out sound from a titanic cymbal--a Chinese gong held on a synthesizer. Here the percussion instrument was a three-mile wall a thousand feet high.
After the rain, the frayed penumbra of the dying storm cell lingered in the west and north for many minutes as the remnants of the system moved northeast towards the Chicago Basin, an irregular filamentary network dissipating at 20,000 feet.
All of this was well worth a delayed noodle dinner!