Head in the Clouds

Fire and Ice, Ocean Waves, and SkyBoobs. What a show!

So it is images this time around, which for the typical “reader” here allows a quick glance and move on to the next newsletter RSS reader posting, back to email, or browsing the InterWebs with no particular place to go.

And here on the ground, it is often to the “heavens” that I go, constantly mesmerized by the kaleidoscopic morphing of shape, texture and color. Our vast skyscape view here is a constant and welcomed distraction from the “real world” below. I spend as much time as possible with my head in the clouds.

Late morning came the roiling sea-waves of the sky produced by complex weaving high-to-low winds that produce this “asperitas” cloud formation—which is one of several cloud types just recently to have become “official.”

Looking up, I imagined being submerged under water, beneath an ocean ceiling during a squall.

New Cloud Types accepted into the taxonomy for the first time in 30 years.

As the day passed, the clouds morphed into pulled threads of high cirrus fibratus, with a skirt of virga. As the sun moved closer to the western skyline, these icey clouds seemed likely to go to pink-orange and put on a show. We pulled up a porch rocker and watched.

The feature of this particular late afternoon was a SUNDOG, with sunlight projected onto the screen of these moving, shape-shifting curtains of ice, at just such an angle from the sun (22 degrees to be exact) turning ICE into FIRE.

And lastly, from a few days ago, the stormy-gray drooping pendulous mammatus cloud formation seemed ominous, with descending pouches of heavy atmosphere giving the cloud its name. If you can’t remember “mammatus” you can just call this kind of cloud Sky Boobs.