No Cloud Selector? No Problem!
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- This topic has 4 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 7 months ago by Howard Brown.
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May 15, 2017 at 4:53 pm #211070Davy ThwaitesParticipant
Out and about and no cloud selector to whip out and dazzle your friends with? Start a singalong with these easy rhymes! Remember, a good cloudspotter is always the life of the party! ;)
When the grey is wet and heavy, thick old cloud down to your arses. It’s everyone’s archenemy, it’s that ghastly Nimbostratus!
They’re the highest, they’re the swiftest, they’re the angel feather’s whispers
They’re the billions of ice crystals shaped by wind-streams, known as Cirrus.A fluffy puff of friendliness, see the shapes both rude and humorous
Fair weather clouds are never loud, they are cuddly, they are Cumulus.On majestic mushroom castles towering high, the anvil lingers.
When Thor’s hammer brings the storm, that’s the power of Cumulonimbus.It’s the one that looks like boobies (schoolboy giggles, snorts & laughters)
And indeed its named from mammaries, called Mamma or MammatusHovering lens-like and mysterious, the saucer slowly passes
I know you know it’s no u.f.o, it’s smooth Lenticularis! -
May 15, 2017 at 11:52 pm #211168Howard BrownParticipant
That’s impressive, Davy, apophenic perhaps, in the sense of MS’ Danah Boyd whose website says of apophenia ‘making connections where none previously existed’.
I am not too sure what you are connecting clouds to, though. Poetry? Song? Rap?
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May 19, 2017 at 9:05 am #211886Gavin Pretor-PinneyKeymaster
Useful stuff, Davy. Who needs a Cloud Selector to jog the memory when you are armed with rhymes like those?
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May 20, 2017 at 7:24 pm #212147Vicki TheriaultParticipant
Can someone tell me why clouds look so flat/level on the bottom side sometimes? I’m new at this and don’t have my cloud selector so when I saw Davy’s song, thought this might be the right place to start.
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May 21, 2017 at 12:26 am #212181Howard BrownParticipant
Hallo, Vicki, and welcome. Great picture, quite duskular (Andrew Kirk’s word).
Let me quote Richard Hamblyn, The Met Office Pocket Cloud Handbook, on cumulus:
These convective clouds are formed above thermals (columns of ascending air) that rise in plumes from the sun-warmed ground… Seeding themselves on condensation nuclei – microscopic grains of dust, smoke, pollen or sea salt that are naturally present in the air – the rising pockets of water vapour expand and cool until they reach the dew point (the temperature at which water vapour condenses into droplets), at which point their payload of moisture condenses and coalesces into clouds.
Thus it is the dew point which causes the flat base.
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