Tag: clouds

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A puffy plume of cloud rising out of a smoke layer in the distance. Up close, a suburban park with trees and grass and blue sky.

About 2:00 in the afternoon today, in a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine. Roughly 50 miles away from the fire, perpendicular to the wind (thankfully!)

That puffy plume looks a lot whiter than the rest, which is clearly smoke, making me wonder if it’s a cloud that’s formed above the fire somehow. Edit: And literally seconds after I post this I spot the term pyrocumulous in another window. So, yeah, it’s a cloud produced by the air heated by the fire. The Wikipedia article has a picture of a cloud produced by this same fire a few days ago.

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Yesterday morning while driving to work, I looked up from the road and saw two parallel lines in the sky: One white, one dark blue. They were, of course, a contrail and its shadow on a thin cloud layer below. Because it was a thin layer, I started looking (when I had the chance) for fragments of halos.

When I finally stopped the car, I took a picture of the contrail and its shadow (now nearly aligned with the sun), looked up and saw a faint edge of a halo. I moved a bit to the left, putting a tree in front of the sun, and there it was: a clear 22-degree circular halo centered on the sun..