I guess the drawback of announcing to the whole world that you are going to post something every day during Lent is that when you don't do it, it's obvious. It should be good for humility, though. That remains to be seen. So, since I didn't manage to post anything yesterday, I will post pictures of the great clouds that we saw on the way home yesterday, and try to write something later, although I don't know if that will work out either.
I wish that you could see how much they looked like furrows. We seem to be having a lot of geometric cloud formations lately. Once day last month, the sky looked alike a checkerboard.
These two were taken one right after the other from the same window, and neither has been edited. Light is very strange.
Then when I got home, I sat down at the computer and said to myself, "Let us see what the cardinals have been up to." The first item I saw was from CBS and said that the pope emeritus was still holed up in Castel Gandolfo. Then I said to myself...well, things I shouldn't have said, and got up from the computer, which is one reason I didn't write anything.
I wonder if Gandalf lives there.
AMDG
Very cool. I wonder what makes them this way. I'll have to ask Dave Brown.
ReplyDeleteThat was really fast, Dawn.
ReplyDeleteAMDG
I wonder if the adjectives used by the media reflects the last movie they watched. "Holed up" as in 'Butch Cassedy and the Sundance Kid' or 'The Hole in the Wall Gang.'
ReplyDeleteI was once walking with an atmospheric physicist when we saw clouds like that, and I asked her about them. She said they were caused by "gravity waves", which I thought was really funny. (Gravity waves, to a physicist like me, are produced by catastrophic astrophysical events like black hole collisions, and emphatically do not affect the weather.) But it turns out there is another kind of gravity wave, and she was right.
ReplyDeleteBasically, these cloud formations can form when there are two relatively distinct atmospheric layers; gravity pulls the cloud down, but buoyancy between the two layers pushes it back up, so that the net effect is a regular oscillation. Presumably row upon row form because of wind. Waves on the surface of a lake are caused by the same phenomenon.
Thanks, Craig! It's hard to see in this picture, but the edges of the clouds were very straight and block-y looking.
ReplyDeleteAMDG