Nephology (CLOUDS) with Rachel Storer

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Oh hey, it's that lady who's both a stranger and also your internet dad. Ali Ward back with a light and a fluffy episode of ologies. Okay, this is a big one. It has been looming overhead since the first time I encountered a list of possible ologies. This is over a decade ago, and I remember seeing mythology and

I doubt that.

Also, two one nine you left a review. You've got it together and I appreciate it. Okay, nephology is the study of clouds. Okay, this is very much a real word. It can mean a scientist of clouds or just someone who likes to gaze up and look at the clouds and would hug a cloud if they could, and is like clouds are tight. Now nef comes from the Greek

Okay.

So this ologist, this nephologist I happened upon on Twitter and I found out she was based in La a million deja horns, and there's a pretty tiny number of professional cloud scientists in the world. She says that conferences are like family reunions, and she was like, hit me up for that cloud chat. Anytime I was thrilled, I was nervous. She came over to my house just this past week, just this past Friday. This is a lightning

I didn't until you said that word.

I was going to ask if people call you a nephrologist a lot, but they don't even call you anphologist.

Oh, nobody calls me that.

No, some of my friends call me a cloud doctor, which I use that one for some of my like social media and stuff.

I just think that sounds neat.

I call a doctor cloud. How long have you been studying clouds or how long? When did you? When did this start?

Oh gosh, well, I mean I've kind of always loved storms, you know, Like I grew up in Pennsylvania and we would get great thunderstorms in the summer and stuff like that, and like my mom and I would sit out in the porch and stick your feet out in the rain, and you know, count between the thunder and the lightning and everything. So I've always been fascinated by it. I remember, but like when I was I was probably twelve or

Oh nice cow. I thought it was Lilia. We got cows.

Yeah. So I think, like a lot of people in my field around my age, like that was one of those like, Oh my gosh, this movie is amazing. And then right around that time, TLC used to have all these about tornadoes and tornado chasing and all this stuff, and I was like, what, like this could be my job is to like study storms.

Yeah.

So yeah, My undergrad was in meteorology, and then I did atmospheric science for grad school and I've been doing that ever since.

Oh my gosh, Okay, how much of a cloud badass is Rachel Well? She is an author on paper such as effects of convective microphysics, paramidization on large scale cloud hydrological cycle and radiate a budget in tropical and mid latitude convected regions. And she got her bachelor's in meteorology from Penn State, which is a big weather school, and did a summer project about aerosols. What the hell is an aerosol? You're asking, well, I asked Google for us.

Did, and so when I went to Colorado State for grad school, it turned out that the woman who I was working with, she was doing research into how aerosol's affect storms.

There you go.

Yeah, living in la we get like four clouds a year. I know, how do you feel about that? It's really sad.

I've gotten to the point where I can get like really psyched by like drizzle, you know.

Your standards just go lower.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta take what you can get.

Just side note for context. LA does not have a lot of clouds. Let's get to the nitty gritty. What the fuck is a cloud? What is it?

It's water in the air, it is It is a lot of water in the air. Okay, So if you like look at just a regular cloud, I think I'm going to probably get the numbers wrong, but it's literally can be like a ton of water in a cloud.

But the droplets are just so so.

Small, and you know, they just can like hang out there in the air and the light reflects off of them, and there's enough of them that we see it as white or gray or whatever.

So you are looking at a cloud and you're like, it's puffy, it's light, it's in the air, and it's just an absolute shit ton of water yeah, above your head. And the reason it's a cloud and not a puddle is I don't know.

Well, so all the droplets are really small, I mean literally like tens of microns across it is a cloud droplet, And so it's just so light, it has so little mass that just like the little bits of air moving up and around are enough to sort of keep it in place, and so it's you know, it's not until the drop gets big enough, until it forms like a rain droplet, that it's sort of heavy enough to fall on it.

Zwe So there is a tipping point obviously in clouds where there's enough water vapor that condenses, where the droplets can't be buoyed by the air underneath it.

Yeah, sort of like eventually there's just enough water and you know, the more water you have in a cloud, the more the water is gonna bump against other water droplets and they start to stick together. And you know, water vaple condense directly onto water droplets and they'll grow as long as it's moist enough, and then yeah, eventually the drops will get big enough that they'll fall.

Oh okay, so let's talk about shapes of clouds.

Okay, the sort of two main type set are stratus and cumulus, And so the sort of difference there is that cumulus clouds are convective, which means that they form because there's air that's sort of warmer than its surroundings and it bubbles up like like you would have bubbles and boiling water or whatever. You just you have air that bubbles up, and so that's sort of why they tend to be like poofy and bumpy on the top and stuff like that.

Sky's always has a little fluffy clouds.

And those are the ones that tend to if you're gonna have storms that those are convective clouds, or you'll just get like the little sort of one of my friends calls them the Simpsons clouds.

Yes, I was gonna ask about that, Like, it's funny. If I ever see a really puffy cumulus cloud, I instantly think of this.

Up.

So those are the puffy, fluffy cotton candy clouds or the cumulus. And then there's this stratus.

Yeah, so stratus literally the word like strata means layer. So stratus clouds are generally layered, which means that they're sort of forming from sort of a larger area that's rising a lot more slowly. So like over the ocean, where things are generally sort of similar everywhere, then you

Oh so it's like a pancake is a stratus cloud and a cumulus is a muffin. Yes, okay, yeah, I'll take it. And then I guess maybe would a strato cumulus be like a waffle?

Sure?

Okay, why not? So hungry? And so then okay, what are some other types of clouds? Like what is a like a pyroclastic cloud or a lenticular? Like what are all these terms?

So pyrocumulus clouds are really cool and also terrifying and kind of sad because they're what happens when you have fire pyro Right, So pyrocumulus is basically when you get so much heat from the fire that it forces convection on its own ps.

Why should anyone care about the meaning of convection when it's not being used to describe an oven that's making me cookies. Well, convection just means a circular current or gas or liquid is less dense and it rises, and then the cooler stuff is more dense and it falls.

I'm talking steamy and so you get these are like really strong, like really crazy colorflowery, convectiony sort of clouds that form. I mean, I've seen them here over the mountains sometimes occasionally when we've gone bad fires. And if you look at like right now, if you look at like satellite imagery over Australia, you can see pyrocumulus clouds.

Oh my god, what about a lenticular cloud?

But plenticular clouds are awesome, Okay, we don't get them a lot around here. Sometimes if you drive a little bit farther east towards the mountains, you can see them. But a lenticular cloud is a wave cloud, so it forms when air is forced over a mountain and the air.

So you get sort of this.

There are these people call them like ufo clouds. A lot of times they have almost this upho shape to them because they just form in the little top part of this wave, and so you get all these really cool and sometimes they build up on top of each other. When I lived in Colorado, we used to get the

Oh, I'm going to look it up. Yeah, y'all, are you sitting, Have you seen a lenticular cloud? They look like sky pancakes or UFOs or like stacks of hanuka gelt. And the word lenticular comes from lens shaped like a bulging disc of a lens. Also the word lens. Are you even capable of dealing with this right now? I don't think you are. It comes from the Latin for lentil, So these giant disc like clouds are like big lentil pillows.

Oh? So many? Really?

Oh yeah?

Do you when you're driving have you ever pulled over to take pictures of weather?

I mean, I've been storm chasing, which is a whole different story in terms of driving and pulling over and looking at weather.

Wait, when did you go storm chasing?

Oh?

When I live in Colorado?

But what does that involve?

Chasing storms?

Do you know if it's going to be safe to do so? Are you are you running? You're running obviously toward it, not away from right toward it.

Yeah, well, ideally you sort of place yourself in the right positions that it will like go just past you so that you can watch it.

And does that involve lightning and thunder and also rain?

Oh yeah, everything?

Yeah, I mean ideally tornadoes, but it's hard to find a tornado.

Ideally tornadoes. That sentence not said often.

I'm sure, Well, you know we're sort of a special breed. No, what aren't no other people who study clouds? What are you guys doing when you're studying clouds? What does it mean to be a cloud doctor? My research specifically is, like I said, on sort of storms cumulatimbus deep convective clouds.

However you want to name them.

And I look at a lot of like basic things about how much water is moving around in the storm within the sort of main updraft of the storm and then out of the top into the anvil clouds, and trying to understand how the environment impacts that. So if it's you know, if it's warmer, or if it's moisture, and like certain layers of the atmosphere, how does that feedback onto how the storm behaves?

Now, does that help people understand just general meteorology and like weather prediction.

Yeah, so it's sort of it's it's sort of this basic fundamental stuff that I'm into, which is for me just I love to answer the questions about it. And then yeah, ideally if I learned something worthwhile, then it could help make models better for prediction or for climate models or whatever.

Do you trust forecasts?

Yeah you do?

Yeah, Yeah, our forecasts are actually really good out to a few days, and they've gotten you know, there's specific ways people score them and stuff like that, and they've gotten better over the years, even like if you look at like, I don't know, something like twenty years ago, like a fort day forecast now is as good as a three day forecast was then or something like that. Like we've gotten even better as we've gotten better models and more compute power and things like that.

Yeah, you mentioned nimbus and anvil clouds.

What are those?

Yeah?

So nimbus means rain, Oh it does.

Yeah, I never knew that. I did not know that. Okay, Wow, that's that's amazing.

Okay, So cumulo nimbus is like a thunderstorm basically. Yeah, that's and then anvil clouds are so literally like the top of the troposphere is called the tropopause, and then above that is the stratosphere, and that layer of that transition is really really stable, so air that goes up can't really go farther than that. And so when you have a storm cloud that goes up, it goes to the tropopause, and the air doesn't have anywhere to go.

Whatever, they look sort of like an anvil. Oh my god, eh.

Okay, quick aside. I looked them up, and these thunderstorms do in fact look like anvils. And their full name is cumulonimbus incus, and the cumulo means heaped, so they're like a bunch of heaps of whipped cream, and the nimbus means rainstorm and incas in Latin, just means anville. So when this rising air hits the tropopause, that's the boundary between the lowest level of our atmosphere and the next level stratosphere. So the cloud hits that, and it's like,

You need the sort of basics that you need our moisture and something for the moisture to condense onto, and you need rising motion. So if you have air that's rising for some reason, like for a convective cloud, it's because you have you know, sort of warm air that gets like buoyant, it's warmed than they are around it. Or like I said, if you have air that's moving over front or over a mountain, then when the air moves up, as air goes up, the pressure goes down

The ideal gas los side note is an equation and it's PV equals NRT. Now p is the pressure of the gas times the volume taken up by the gas, and those multiplied equal its temperature times the gas constant times the number of moles of the gas. What's my point? My point is a professional mythologist does all kinds of computer modeling and physics and stuff on a whiteboard and doesn't just get to stare at the sky and say, it's a chill fucking cloud.

Man.

It's funny that something so beautiful that we see every day is so complicated, you know what I mean?

And that's part of what I love about it, right, I'm like, Okay, due point, saturation, vapor pressure.

You don't want to hear these things.

Those are great, those are great points. Okay, So you've heard the due point. So the due point is the temperature at which water would condense given the amount of moisture that's currently in the air. Right, So the higher the due point, the more humid it is.

Okay.

So as you raise air, it gets cooler, and so eventually it'll get to where it equals the due point of that sort of bit of air that's rising, okay, and so at that point condensation can happen.

Oh okay, Okay, so quick recap. The due point is the temperature that water would start to condense, and a fifty degree due point is pretty comfy, but a seventy degree due point is just getting into swamp bottom territory. Now, living in La this due point info was new to me. I had not the foggiest idea. And when does something become a cloud if it's foggy? If you know what I mean, is fog a cloud?

Foggy is a cloud?

Fog is just a cloud that's touching the ground.

Cool, literally all it is?

Yeah, how far does it have to go before it's a cloud? Just above your head like it is a cloud? Is that a philosophical or a meteorological question?

I mean, I think it's it's one of those like fuzzy things because if it's funny like I you know, if you fly through a cloud, right, like when are you in the cloud?

And when are you not in the cloud?

Right?

Because there's like all these little water droplets and at some point it's enough that you can see it, but if you look at it with like a light r there's a lot more that you can't see because it's just too small or too sparse or whatever.

You know.

So at what point is it a cloud versus not a cloud?

Right?

It's not like there's weird hard boundaries, right, so you know, touching the ground versus not like you.

Know, give a wiggle room.

Okay, what is it like for you when you're flying and you fly through clouds and you like burst through and you're like not, ah, Like, what is is that always a more fun for you? Are you always like on the window seat? I like the window seat a lot. I try to I try to plan it depending on what time my flight is. Oh yeah, Like if if I'm flying in like the middle of the day, I'm

I like to bee a lot.

I like I'm well hydrated. So if it's a nighttime thing. What Why do clouds cause so much turbulence?

Because where there's clouds, it means that there's a lot of air moving around. It's sort of a chicken and egg thing because you know you're gonna have more clouds where there's air going up, but also clouds themselves because there's sort of evaporation and condensation happening. It's like you're going over little waves in the ocean almost right where if you if you are in a pocket of air that goes down pretty quickly, then the plane will get forced down a little bit right.

Have you ever seen people during minor turbulence freaking out and you want to just be like, yo, I'm a cloud doctor. Is there a cloud doctor on this plane? You're like, I am, and it's gonna be fine.

I am careful about whether I tell people what I do or not.

Really sometimes on the plane.

What kind of questions do strangers ask you the most?

Oh?

Well, I get like, I get like ridiculous, like conspiracy theory things like people are all about chem trails.

There's something I believe in, calmly in keem trails. I have seen them.

I know they're I've seen camtrails. Let's break it down. I was gonna ask you about that. I mean, cam trails are definitely chemicals that are being spread by the government. Yeah, to make us stupid, right, Yeah, they help they.

Like read our minds and you know, yeah, they make us like docile.

Oh cool, And that's what I thought. No, what people do think that about when they see contrails from jets?

Right mm hmm yep.

And then you'll see these you can go down a rabbit hole of like YouTube videos where people just like we'll post like any picture of a cloud that looks like at all weird, and they'll be like, see it's proof.

And that's the cam trail.

Wow.

Do you look for faces in clouds or is that something that you abandoned as a child. Do you still look for u shapes and clouds.

I don't really go out of my way too. I mean, if I see it, i'll you know, take note of it or whatever. But I tend to I mean I tend to just sort of like dare agog at them, you know, just like, oh, it's so pretty.

So we sat on my couch staring at the sky which was hazy with stripy things in it. They were probably Stratus or cumulus. Right, what is the what are these today? These are Stratus?

Those are serious?

What the fuck is it?

Cerrus? So serious? Is really high up? Basically? Oh yeah.

So there's sort of like three kind of like levels that we sort of think about in terms of like the heights of the clouds or whatever. And so the higher up ones are serious, the middle ones are like Alto, so we have like Alto Stratus or whatever, and then the low ones are like just like the stratus or cumulus or you know, things like that.

So you can tack on a prefix to tell you where in the sky it is.

Yeah, I mean yeah, if you look at like the actual you could find like there's like a cloud appreciation society that has there's like all sorts of different Yeah. The names get like reach in terms of like how specific it gets for different kinds of clouds.

I cannot keep track.

Okay, so let me pause for a minute just to tell you that she is not kidding. If you have ever stared into the mirror loathing yourself for not knowing what different cloud names mean, call your therapist and tell him you're healed, because guess what, you are not alone. Cloud names. They're numerous, and they're long, and they're confusing, like not even a rare professional nephologist can grasp them all. But I am here to lead us through the haze. So first off, let's all pour little fog juice on

Beats me, dudes?

And actually, you know what I swear looking at this cloud naming is less complicated than a Starbucks order, and just like a lata, you can customize. So the Howard method, remember he's the granddaddy of clouds, has a bunch of sub sub categories, like cumulus, which means heapy whipped cream clouds. Stratus can mean low or sheet like either one whatever. Nimbo stratus, for example, is a low rain cloud. Before

One thing that I get picky about is that the bottom of clouds is generally pretty flat.

So if you look at sort of like a field of.

Like cumulus clouds, like sort of the we call them fair weather cumulus, just sort of like the nice little puffy Simpson's clouds, they generally will have like a pretty flat base and they're all at like the same height. And so when people draw clouds and they're like all poofy at the bottom to do that, I'm just like, Oh, You're like, you don't get it.

You don't get it. By the bye, after we stop recording, Rachel mentioned that she has a cloud tattoo. On her left shoulder blade, and she said the design was really important and she had to work with the artists to make sure that the cloud was flat on the bottom. As an ethologist, that was very critical. And also the morning we recorded this, her husband Eric had texted her a good luck chiff of a cloud, and in his text, she showed me that he apologized for its shape, which

You know, I get pretty arch when people to do the whole like, oh, you get paid to be wrong half the time. That sort of thing. That's one of those that like sticks in your craw because you're like, oh, you don't even know, we do so well. It's like confirmation biased that you remember the one time that they screw up right, but like you really like would do pretty well, Like you generally know whether you should bring an umbrella or not.

You know, right, hard, it's really hard.

That is really hard to see something so far down the horizon and to say, hey, we saved your butt on those rainy days. Yeah, I have so many Patroon questions.

Are you ready?

Yes, okay, okay, she is ready, but first before your Patreon questions. Each week we make a donation to a cause of theologists choosing, and this week, given the chat about pyrocumulus clouds and the wildfires in Australia, Rachel chose the World Wildlife Funds charity Australian Wildlife and Nature Recovery Fund, which supports veterinarians who are treating injured wildlife and provides

Now get value. You can't argue with Optesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest mail deal for Tea starring one main Tea sites and does it for only sixteen year row like succulent Board, be approved Fibrus shining a strip loin steaks with peppercorn butter or delicious firous chicken parmegama served with creamy potato, great arm under a mix of rainbow root vegetables, and enjoy Goozillionaire or Saltier caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that

Okay, back to your cloud questions. Catherine asks, why are they so fucking cool? Molly Rupp says word for word the question I was gonna ask, Well, so, yeah, at clouds, why are they so cool?

I mean, they just are, right, I couldn't put a bare myself. Clouds are fucking cool. And that's like the great thing is, like, you know, like no matter what, I can just look outside and be.

Like, that's just really cool.

It's cool. It's like wallpaper for the sky, right, you know what I mean? And it's different every day and the time. Yeah, it's beautiful and sometimes it rains on us, Yeah, in a great way. Okay, wants to know why you're cloud's white?

Uh yeah, I started got this a little bit earlier, like because you have a lot of droplets all in the same place and the light bounces off of them and gets scattered. I guess theyatur in all of the different directions, and so that that looks to our eyes like white.

Basically.

Hum.

Kayla Simpson wants to know how do whole punch clouds form? Oh, so, okay, so this is interesting. Okay, So I have never seen a whole punch cloud or a fall streak, whole punch cloud, or a cloud canal, or a cavim or a sky punch, call them what you want. But I looked it up and it's like, there's just this big gaping bite taken from the middle of a cloud. And if you had had moonshine for dinner, I can certainly see why you would think this was an alien spaceship, as many people

Between zero degrees see and negative forty degrees see, all three phases of water can exist, right. You can have liquid, you can have vapor, and you can have solid. If there's like this diagram that shows like where the dew point of water is. And then also there's like an ice a similar one for ice right where at a certain temperature then ice would form. But in those in those in between regions, it's actually easier to form ice

Oh my god, that's nuts. But I'm gonna ask, how do you feel about the term cloud computing? Uh?

You know, I don't have like strong opinions on it, but I do get a lot of followers on Twitter from various like cloud computing resources and whatever.

I guess those people would be techefologists, do you think so? I don't know, Yeah, I think they'd be a tech an apologist. First time question asker Navarro wants to know in places like Brooklyn, big Up, it's overcast almost every day only in the winter, no visible sun, just a silvery white haze blanketing the entire sky. I actually got curious and googled it the other day. Turns out the explanation is nephological in nature. So can you please explain?

Yeah, so, I mean I'm from Pennsylvania originally, and so I know the great skys of winter. It's a depressing time of year.

So here's an all effective disorder.

Yeah.

So a lot of it is just the kind of clouds that tend to form. So you know, a lot of like the stratus I was, like I said, form when the atmosphere is stable, and so you get sort of like these blankety the stratus clouds. And in the winter generally the type of weather that happens tends to be that type of weather.

And we don't get a lot of sun right that.

You know, the Earth's tilt is like such that we're not getting a lot of sun that time here and so like the ground's not heating up a lot, and so you don't get a lot of like convective clouds or anything like that, and so a lot of the stuff is just stratisy, overcast sort of stuff.

I'm from San Francisco, and I just call that sunscreen. I myself a foggy day off soap weather JKJK. The Skin Cancer Foundation says that up to eighty percent of the sun's UV rays can pass right through clouds. So sunscreen just wants to be friends. It's here to help

Yeah, So in order to form a cloud droplet, you need something for it to condense onto. Okay, Like I said, we usually call these things aerosols. They're like little like solid or liquid particles that come from different reactions in the atmosphere or sometimes it's dust or whatever. Oh so cloud seating they do it in some places do it sort of for research. There's a couple places that do

I don't remember what they use for it. Some sort of salt probably m M.

I was going to say for breeze, but okay, yeah, okay, they actually can use calcium chloride or dry ice, or silver iodide or propane or even tiny.

Particles of sodium chloride table salt. Bust those into the sky to change the weather. Like we went through a spacetime portal into the future. But actually cloud seating and weather modification has been going on for like fifty years.

At least, and you're sort of changing the makeup of that cloud. If there's not enough of those particles and you put some in the atmosphere, you're sort of triggering cloud formation. If you like want it to rain more there maybe or sometimes what happens is if you're sort of slowing down the rain process, then you can make it rain maybe further downstream right about your line.

And Emmanuel Sanchez want to know what is that happening at the Beijing Olympics with their weather modification.

That, as far as I understand, that's what happened, was that they did some sort of cloud seating to try and rain out some of the pollution.

Yeah.

I don't know the details on it though.

Who Okay, So I look this up and apparently China is all about cloud seating and they shoot rockets of silver iodide into the sky and then sometimes hot got it rains over another country and then everybody fights about whose rain it is? Like is it cedars keepers? I don't know. I'm not a cloud litigator. Is that ethical to cloud seed? As a cloud doctor, how do you feel about it? Yeah?

I mean it's not really harmful.

You know, what you're putting in the atmosphere is just, like I said, some sort of salt or whatever, the kind of thing that's up there anyway. I mean, it's not something that can really be done to any sort of large scary scale or anything like that. It's not easy to do, and it's not easy to do well. The places where it is done is like really sort of small scale places where they understand that environment really well.

Julia Tolbert, also first time question asker, wants to know do clouds have a smell?

Do clouds have a smell? I've never noticed a smell.

I mean rain has a smell, right, because you get that it's called petrocore mm hmm, the smell of rain, which is like really, I think it's like something in the dirt that gets stirredup when it gets wet or.

Something like that. Yeah.

Yeah, I hope clouds don't have a smell. It's mostly just water.

Okay. A lot of.

People, of course want to know about climate change. Emily Elaine, Nikaia Wooten, who's a first time question asker. Haley Everson first time question asker. Also Sarah Does and Jay, Julie Beert Schmannie Thompson, and janew They all want to know, in Haley's words, will climate change affect the clouds we see? And will certain types of clouds become less common or even go extinct.

Oh okay, so it's a really complicated question that we don't really know the answer to but I mean the short answer is yes, it will change things as it gets warmer, sort of can like shift climate patterns around, and so you know, places that maybe weren't warm enough for there to be like a lot of conductive clouds might get more of those, or you can sort of

Yeah, are we going to get drier as we get warmer?

So it depends on where you are.

There's one of the sort of things that gets thrown a lot is this like rich get Richer idea where the places that are moist will get moister, and the places that are dry will get drier, which is unfortunate. Right, Like, you know, if you live in a place it's like prone to flooding, you don't want more of that, And if you live in California, you don't want more drought. Like there's a lot of indications that that might be the way things are going.

So we got to stock up on moisturizer in La Yeah, for sure.

Hoof.

Yeah, I know that this is probably a question you get a lot. It's a super stupid question, which is why I'm asking it. The difference between weather and climate. Yeah, do you have to explain that a lot?

It's a first step a lot of the time because people a lot of times when people have doubts about climate change, a lot of it is like they have all these distrust of the models that we use, or people will just be like, oh, it's it's cold, where's that global warming? Right? Yeah, So there's like a lot of really cool analogies for it that I try to remember. But so, like one of the obvious ones is that the climate is the clothes that are in your closet, and the weather is the clothes that you wear.

Ha ha, that's a that's a great way to get people to understand the difference, you know, and you kind of address this but like a round tree. First time question asker, Mike, first time question asker, and Bryce and also Evan want to know is it true, in Bryce's words that clouds often weigh millions of pounds?

Yeah, millions sounds like a lot. I don't okay, I had to do the math, but like definitely thousands, like like the like ton has definitely been thrown around.

Okay, you know those like random facts that you hear stuff like that. Gracie Zescha wants to know what is your favorite cloud information and why?

Oh okay, So my favorite clouds are mammatus clouds, right, Okay, So mammatus clouds usually they can form in other ways, but usually they form on the underside of anvils. Right, So I said, the anvil is this big cloud that comes out from a thunderstorm, and Mattis clouds happen like almost sort of opposite the way that that tumuless clouds do, where you get sort of little pockets of air that comes down and so like it looks like really bumpy and it looks like this really cool formation.

There's a trip down memory lane. Mattis the word, you know, I mean the sort of yeah, where the root.

Of that comes from, right, Because you get those little like bulby bulbousy things and they're just really really cool looking and they're associated with storms, right, so you see them like after a storm passes, and especially like if it's evening time the light shines on them, they can look like really really cool. They're my shavorite, yeah, and they're boob clouds, their boop clouds.

Nice. Aaron Ryan wants to know what would it actually feel like to fall through a cloud.

I mean, it would just be like falling, but you'd be kind of moist.

It'd be like a ouch. It would be like ouch. Elizabeth Ganie wants to know why do cumulo nimbus clouds appear to us as such crazy colors like yellow and green and purple.

So on, sort of what's in them and how the light is scattering? Like the darker that a cloud is usually the more stuff is in it, right, because it's blocking the light above it. Like if it's really dark overhead, there's sort of like more moisture in that cloud, right, Like if it rains the clouds overhead are usually like really dark gray. Sometimes cumulanimous cloud will tend to look greenish, and often that means that there's hail in it. What because of just the hails really big and it just

Tinge to it.

Yeah, and then if you get clouds like on the horizon, it all you get all sorts of different color effects because of the angle of the light and the way that it scatters and stuff.

Catherine Finny wants to know. I once heard from a meteorologist friend that it's possible for clouds to have over one hundred percent humidity. Is that true? How can that be true?

It is?

Actually, Yeah, So it's kind of funny.

So because if you have like a.

Blob of air, like when we think about clouds, we'd sort of like hypothesize this this parcel of air, which is I don't know, if you think.

About like a balloon without the balloon on it, sort of the.

Blob of air and it has a certain amount of water in it, and it has a certain temperature. There's like this like sort of equilibrium that happens when you have like exactly the same amount of water, you know, at that dew point, temperature whatever.

But like.

Nothing happens instantaneously.

And so you can get like a couple of percent over one relative humidity.

WHOA, that's nuts. Okay, so that's not a lie. That's not fun flam. This, by the way, is called supersaturation, in case you ever meet a meteorologist and need to impress them in a pinch. Also, I may as well mention that sky writing involves smoking oil like paraffin to write words, and it's usually done around three thousand feet up and to leave a sky message for your sweetie.

So, I mean again, things don't happen instantaneously, right, and so if you have like rain that forms from a cloud, it can be falling. The cloud itself might dissipate in the time that it takes for that rain to fall on you. Or you could have, you know, just a little cloud that's sort of like moving quickly and you get some rain that falls.

So yeah, it could happen.

Just be popping by Eliza Gaston wants to know how much truth is there in the saying red sales at night sailors, delight, red sales the morn sailors be warned. You ever heard that?

Yeah, I've heard red skies at night sailors. Still, yeah, it's the there is actually some truth to it, and it has to do with the kind of clouds that you get. And it's like if you have like an approaching weather system versus something that's just passed where you'll see like sirrus clouds in the way that the light scatters off of them and stuff like that.

So this adage is attributed to everyone from Shakespeare to Jesus literally, and the logic behind it is, to quote the Library of Congress. When we see a red sky at night, this means that the setting sun is sending its light through a high concentration of dust particles, and this usually indicates a high pressure and stable air coming in from the west. Basically, good weather will follow, and a red sunrise can mean that good weather has passed. And if it's deep, fiery red, there may be a

So, I mean, like I said, water carries with it, you know, the stuff that it was in it up in the sky. And so if there's yeah, a lot of carbon dioxide and the sky, or a lot of sulfate forms like sulfur orica. But yeah, whatever's in the atmosphere that can sort of form an acid, well, yet it'll raise the acidity of the rain as it falls. Yeah, it's pretty pretty gross and harmful. And yeah, if we keep sticking stuff up in the atmosphere, that's the thing that happens.

So acid rain was on American mines more in the nineteen eighties before the Clean Air Act of nineteen ninety, but that didn't totally curb sulfur dioxide emissions in some countries. Environmental regulations haven't caught up since then. So acid rain, just like acid water genes, remains a global threat. Logan K wants to know. Is a SunDog a type of cloud?

No, it's SunDog is okay, So there has to be a cloud for a SunDog to happen, Okay, But what happens is it's usually a cloud that you can't see. It's usually like a lot, like a really thin ice cloud. And then if the sun is at a particular angle, then the scattering of the sun off of that ice cloud will make that really cool bright spot.

Oh I don't think I've ever seen a SunDog. Okay, so I Google image search them and sun dogs are like ice halos that make these glittery, shiny spots on the horizon kind of flanking the sun like a couple of Beyonce dancers. Now, Also, as long as I was looking up sundogs, I was like, what about cloud cats? Boy freakin' hownie. There are a lot of cat shaped clouds on the Internet. Some of them have questionable authenticity.

Yeah, so it's not necessarily about the heaviness of the cloud. It's sort of about the heaviness of the drops. Okay, there has to be enough water so that like rain can form. You know, a rain drop that has to be certain sort of a certain size before it's big enough, heavy enough to fall through there ballpark. Like a rain drop is like, I don't know, a millimeter or something like that.

Okay ooh.

Also, after we stopped recording, Rachel mentioned that the rain drop emoji is on our shit list too, because rain drops flatten out when they're falling and they make the shape of like a boob implant or like a whoopee cushion or I guess a lentil. So now we know that boob implants and whoopy cushions are lenticular. What a great, big, beautiful world we live in. John Moorster said, I've seen clouds that have tornadoes in them and they have a greenish tint. I live in Nebraska. Is that the hail?

The hail?

Yeah?

What the hail?

Pandora two says that my son Shay, who's nine and is a first time asker, wants to know why are clouds never square?

Oh that's neat. I like that kids ask the best questions.

Because I would say probably because of like turbulence and arizonays moving around and stuff like that. Plus there's like all this sort of like chaotic stuff that happens on the small scale.

And clouds where.

You know, just because you have sort of similar conditions right here, they won't be exactly the same ten feet away, and so maybe you'll get a little bit more cloud here than you get there. And it's all kind of uneven.

But they're flat on the bottom.

They're pretty flat in the bottom.

Megan Leonard first top question asker wants to know can clouds carry parasites or harmful pathogens like giardia?

Oh?

Can clouds get beaver fever? Is also another thing that Megan would like to know. I don't know.

I don't know what that is. Okay, that sounds in appropriate. I have no idea if claud presumably like I mean, yeah, I know that they can have bacteria. Yeah, Like bacteria is something that can actually be like a cloud condensation nuclei if it's like the right shape or whatever.

Really, so it could rain giardia down on you maybe maybe, I hope not. I just googled can it range giardia? And I found out that there can be algae and fungus and bacteria, all kinds of things in clouds, and between that and the chemtrail research, Google's probably pretty worried about me. Have you ever heard about those storms of like lizards and frogs that rain down, Yeah, that'll turn out cloud green. If you're like lizard brain Dad, you're

Oh my gosh, wow, I mean you know, Stratus clouds would be sort of like gloomy, you know, like emo, yeah, or like I'm picturing like sadness on inside out, you know, sort of like l and then and then yeah. Cumulus clouds would be would be pretty happy, I think, right. Okay, just they're the pretty friendly, they're just chill.

Yeah. Cumulative as clouds will.

Probably be like you have like a short temper, okay, make the thunder.

What would lenticular clouds be, like, you're weird? Aunt?

Maybe?

Yeah, I feel like a pyro cumulus would be uh yeah, not someone I would want to.

Mess withroably not.

First timer Polytar wants to know why do clouds look like they're moving really fast?

Sometimes they are moving really fast, sometimes really have Yeah, I mean so like you tend to get like, you know, how there is a jet stream that jets like to fly in.

I mean, the air up there.

Can move like oh, trying to think like fifty knots or something like that, so it can just zooms through.

Yeah.

And if you look up and there's clouds at different layers, it's cool. You can you see that they're moving at different speeds.

Ah, so you can just sort of track one and it's just floating right over you. Yeah, just like ah, we're bot. Melissa Crocey wants to know first time question asker, what do we know about clouds on other planets? If anything? Are there different types of clouds on those planets?

Yeah?

So, the the neat thing about clouds on other planets is that a lot of them aren't water clouds, which is like just sort of mind boggling to think about, because the temperatures are like so much colder, for instance, that you can get like methane clouds stuff like that.

Yeah, so that's pretty neat.

Okay. I checked into this and NASA JPL researchers have calculated that in the methane stormy regions of Saturn it could rate up to two point two million pounds of diamonds annually. You have a crush on Saturn, now, don't you. If you like it, you can have to put a ring on it. Rings.

Okay.

You know what's funny about that is when I picture it raining diamonds, I picture it like cut gemstones and not just rocks.

Like I picture that.

There's an episode of Doctor Who I think where there's like something like that, some sort of diamond planet.

Like they're already cut in polish, like the diamond mode. I picture the same thing, and you're like, ow out. What do you think is the crappiest thing about clouds? What do you hate or what do you hate about studying them? Or what is your least favorite cloud? What about clouds is on your shit list?

Wow?

I don't know. I just love clouds. But yeah, I mean,

So people picture you just on a grassy hill staring up at the sky with maybe like a casual notepad next to you, but really you're like.

You're at a computer. Yeah, I'm at a computer constantly. Yeah, I mean what, I use computer models to do my work and yeah, so I you know, make fake clouds in the computer. They're less pretty than the real ones.

What do you love the most about clouds or your work or about being a nephologist, which you know know you are.

Yeah, I mean I just love that, like on a day when my work is making me grumpy, that I can just go outside and look at the sky and be like, oh, right, that's the thing that I'm studying, like this cool thing, And you know, I get to work with other people who get excited about it too.

Like the few days of the year that we do get a storm come through.

There's like a couple of us that are like really like the weather we needs in the group that'll be like outside, like huddled on the side, like, oh.

My gosh, there's actual weather, I know.

And the greatest thing about la is that when it does rain here, it's like a holiday, Like, yeah, people don't go to work. Yeah, everyone cancels their planned it's just like, well it's raining, and it's like, oh no, no, no, I know, we'll I'll be staying home, which is so thrilling. Any advice to anyone who wants to become an apologist.

So, one of the biggest things in meteorology that I think maybe people don't know is how much math it is.

Okay, so if you want.

To study meteorology, you should probably bone up on your math skills a lot of like mathe and physics and stuff like that.

Cool. Well, I would say that you were a ray of sunshine, but you're really uh, I feel like that's an insult in your work. So you're just a very You're a very dense and deep, dark, stormy cloud. And I mean that as a compliment. Okay, that's the best kind of cloud, right them. So as always meet smart people and then invite them into your home if you feel like it, to ask them stupid questions, and to follow doctor stores. She's on Twitter at clouds in my Beer.

Okay.

So, once I had this big meeting, I was really nervous about it, and for fun at a time, I was talking to a good friend who's like, let me draw you a tarot card from the deck sitting next to me, I'll see what advice I should give you, kind of like and let's see what your fortune cookie says. And the card was a sword, and I don't know dick about taro, but she was like, oh, that kind of means like action and courage and power. And I

So hot tip there.

But yeah, it's your body, graffiti it up for the day. Also, sometimes it's fun to write happy birthday on your butt and then hang out with a friend all day and then moon them and they're like, surprise. Just make sure that the ink is non toxic. I'm just your old dad looking out for you.

Okay, bye bye, pacodermatologybiology, rypto, zoology, lithology, Yeah, erreology, meteorology, mattology, apology, seriology, silology.

Right up in here, we'll make a happy little cloud. Here's just the corner of the brush.

You can just put as many layers of clouds in your world as you want.

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