Category Archives: Clouds

Clouds and things

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We are in the middle of a fairly long string of rainy days, interspersed with days that are merely clouds. Everything is pretty gray right now.

This image was from a few days ago, before the deluge.

I like this one because of the three segments of the image. There is the top area, which is very close to a mackerel sky. Then there is the lower area of dark clouds. Below that there is the reddish glow of sunrise with the stacks and cooling towers of the power plant in the distance.

I took this on another day.

It’s a nice shot to the east opposite the sunset, but that’s not why I took it. The reason I took it had disappeared towards the north by the time I got outside with my camera. But then I saw something else.

Here it is a little closer.

A formation of geese. There are only eight here. The other flock was much larger. It was their honking that alerted us to their presence.

This was some blue sky and white clouds that appeared unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon.

I took this right after I took the dogs out for their pre-dusk constitutional, without my camera, of course. It’s nice enough, but, again, the scene I really wanted had disappeared by the time I got back outside with my iPhone.

It’s going to be rainy for the rest of this week. That means the dogs get a short morning walk. That’s actually OK, because we’re having to reduce Zeke’s activities for a while anyway. He suffered some pretty bad back pain two weekends ago. He and I spent the night together in the living room, him walking constantly, and me lying on our sofa, hoping he would finally be able to settle down and sleep. He couldn’t. He would lie down for a few minutes, then get up, sometimes with a little whimper, and then he would stretch, and pace. We had already given him the medication our vet prescribed for this problem, but it always takes a full day before he gets any relief. It’s hard to watch him when he’s hurting like that.

I took him to the vet that morning but she didn’t have anything else to suggest. She said we just have to wait for the medication to get into his system. We give him previcox, which is an NSAID. It’s the second or third medication we have tried, and it doesn’t work any more quickly than the previous ones.

 

Moon over the maple

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Thursday night the moon was just past full. There were a few clouds in the sky. This is what it looked like when I took the dogs out for their last evening walk.

I put my camera on a tripod and took a time exposure for this shot. I don’t know exactly how long the exposure was, but I think it was around one or two seconds. The tree is our misshapen but photogenic maple.

You may or may not be able to see a kind of spider web effect around the image of the moon. This is caused by reflection from the branches of the tree. Any part of the branch that is perpendicular to a line to the center of the moon will give a nice reflection. The parts of the branches at other angles don’t reflect much, so it leaves a kind of broken wreath around the moon.

There is also some iridescence in the clouds below the moon. I didn’t notice it until I saw the photo.

A patchy fog

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According to our local TV weather people, 2018 had the second highest precipitation on record for Atlanta, and, according to our local newspaper, Rome had the third highest on record. I have no reason to doubt that. We have had rain, and then more rain.Topsoil and grass seed washed away, trees fell across the road, and cats and dogs got muddy feet. I took this picture on the night of January 1, just as one period of rain stopped.

The fog rose in patches across town, lit from below by the city lights.

After that night, we had some sunny days, but today, Thursday, is not one of them. It started raining lightly just as I went outside to walk the dogs, and it has been raining lightly ever since. We have only accumulated a quarter of an inch, but at 3 pm it was still only 38 degrees outside. Zeke is drying himself in front of the fire after a quick turn outside. Tomorrow is supposed to be better.

A note on the photo: I used a zoom lens on my Olympus camera on a tripod and let the camera decide what the exposure should be. It was probably about a second or two. There were a lot of blurred images; this was the least blurred. It’s possible to see one of the water towers visible from our from porch, around a third of the way from the right side of the image. I think the blurry, bright object just to the left and above the water tower is the City Clock, which stands on a hill overlooking downtown. There is a little red speck of an antenna marker light sitting almost on the tower’s shoulder. If I knew my camera a little better I might have been able to get a better shot.

And town disappeared

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A few days ago Leah got up earlier than me — thanks, Mollie — and saw that most of the rest of the world had disappeared beneath a blanket of fog. She shot a bunch of pictures, and this is one.

The long ridge on the right is Mount Alto.

We often see spots of fog in the morning, here and there, mainly collecting in the lower parts of the up-and-down terrain below the mountain. This is called valley fog. It’s caused by radiative cooling of the air near the surface which then flows downhill into the valleys, where it collects. If it’s cold enough, water vapor condenses to form fog. So, it’s really a type of radiation fog.

This morning, however, the fog was everywhere, not just in the valleys.

This view is directly towards downtown Rome. The tower is a telephone company antenna.

I can’t see the top the City Clock, which stands on what used to be Neely Hill and is now called Clock Tower Hill, but it was just peeking through the fog. The stacks and cooling towers of Georgia Power’s coal-fired generating plant is barely visible on the horizon.

This fog is radiation fog. We had a cool, clear night with conditions just right for fog formation. We also sometimes see a sort of reverse advection fog. Advection fog is usually considered to be the type of fog that forms when warm, moist air moves over a cool surface, causing water vapor to condense and form fog. In our cases, however, it is cool air moving over the warm rivers, causing moisture evaporating from the river to condense as fog in the cool night air. This is usually called steam fog.

We often talk about fog “lifting” as the sun rises. As the sun rises, it tends to warm the ground, which causes the air just above to get warmer and the fog to evaporate. As the air gets warmer, the bottom layer of the fog retreats upwards until all the fog dissipates. If the fog is thick enough, it can keep the surface from warming because not enough sunlight can penetrate. People on the West Coast are probably more familiar with that kind of thick fog that we are here in the Southeast.

This was a welcome change for us. For a couple of weeks we, up here on the mountain, were the ones in the fog. For the people down below, we were up in the clouds.

Some sun, lots of rain

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We’ve had a fairly long period of wet weather, interrupted occasionally by a sunny day. I don’t really mind a rainy day. There’s something nice about being warm and dry while it’s cold and wet outside.

One day this week it was foggy — cloudy to those down at the bottom of the mountain — and it had been raining, so I took the dogs on a short walk up to the top of the mountain where power lines cross the ridge. The towers looked like half-hidden alien structures. And there was a crackle in the air. Turn your volume up for this video.

The buzzing sound is caused by what is essentially leaking electrical power. It’s audible only during wet conditions, at least if the power company is doing its job on the transmission lines. It’s called a corona discharge.

I had walked the dogs up a few days earlier when the view was more open. There were still a few clouds scudding about down in the valley.

What might look like a particularly bright cloud near the center of the image is actually a lake.

The maples have turned. It was hard to get a nice, bright image, but here’s one where I tried.

With all the rain, the wet-weather streams are running all over the mountain. I can hear the rushing water everywhere on our walk, even when I can’t see the streams.

This is where one stream crosses Fouche Gap Road near the bottom of the mountain in Texas Valley.

Sam always wants to drink from the ditches beside the road when we start back up the mountain. I usually let him. He didn’t notice this little fellow,

I suspect this is a red salamander, rather than a mud salamander. According to Caudata Culture (“The information resource for newt and salamander enthusiasts”), the two are hard to differentiate. The red salamander is “often associated with the environs of clear, rocky, streams” while the mud salamander frequents muddy areas. Unfortunately, I see their squashed little bodies in the road fairly often.

The rain ended Thursday, although the clouds stuck around for a while. Thursday night is supposed to be the coldest since last spring. Leah feels sorry for Dusty and Chloe, who stay on our front porch, which is soaked with the blowing rain. They do have cat houses with heating pads, and a foam insulation surround. Leah drapes a bed spread over the beds to try to keep the wind from blowing directly on them.