Smologies #32: CLOUDS with Rachel Storer

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Mum, why did they call it Scottish cheese?

It's cottage cheese, honey. And I'm not sure.

Did the dogs in other countries speak different languages?

Yeah?

I think so.

When when we get there, well, we've got to fix the car first, but there's someone coming to help us.

Is it the man from Geneva?

Not Geneva, he's from a Viva. Oh there's a van now.

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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. Ooh, things are getting dark and stormy, or maybe puffy and beautiful and shaped like a dinosaur. Because it's Clouds and this is smologies and smologies are versions of our classic episodes that we've edited down to be shorter, and we've also taken out any language that might be objectionable, so it's safe for

List of possible ologies.

This is over a decade ago, and I remember seeing nephology and thinking immediately like.

Who does that? Who is one?

And it was on my mind like a puffy thought bubble over my head so much that if you listen to the ending theme music, you will hear meteorology nephology. So of course you know, I'm bumped to get my head into the clouds for this.

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 for cloud straight up. But it is not to be confused with the objects of nephrology, which has an R in it that means the kidneys, your p organs, which we will explore another time.

I promise. Okay.

So this ologist, this nephologist, I happened upon on Twitter and she was like, hey, me up for that cloud chat. Anytime I was thrilled, I was nervous. She came over to my house. We sat on my couch with my sleeping indoor raccoon Grammy just inches away, and we looked out of the atmosphere while we discussed what is a cloud? What are they called?

And why?

What ancient weather adages can we actually rely on diamond rain and clouds shaped like everything under the sun with atmospheric scientist professional cloud looker at her and nephologist doctor Rachel Storer.

Knowlogious alogy minology knowlogist.

Do you know that you are a nephologist?

I didn't until you said that word.

I was going to ask if people call you a nephrologis a lot but they don't even call you an apologist.

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 a doctor cloud.

Let's get to the nitty gritty.

What 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 ton of water 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 its own.

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 as 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 puffy and bumpy on the top and stuff like that. The sky's always have the fluffy clouds, and those are the ones that tend to if you're going to have storms that those are convective clouds.

So those are the puffy, fluffy yeah, cotten candy clouds are like 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

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. And this happens in weather patterns a bunch because the surface of the earth is warm, so it heats air.

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.

Oh my god, what about a lenticular cloud?

But lenticular clouds are awesome. Okay, But a lenticular cloud is a wave cloud. So it forms when air is forced over a mountain. Oh and air, So if the air atmosphere in general is kind of stable, then when air goes up, it'll sort of go back down again, and it'll go sort of up and down in like this like large wave, and in the parts where it goes up, a cloud will form if you know conditions are right, and 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 most amazing lenticular clouds. And also, like you if you ever look at like pictures of like Mountaineer and Washington, sometimes they'll form like on top of the mountain and you'll get this like a really cool like layered It's hard.

To describe with just words, but 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 gelp. 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 disk like clouds are like big lentil pillows. And I'll be honest, I think I just crossed the line to wanting to join the cloud Appreciation Society, which is a real thing. 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.

The clouds don't have anywhere to go, and.

So they spread out and that's where and it's they're called anvil clouds because if you look at the cheape of them, where they sort of like peak out and point out or 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 whip cream. And the nimbus means rainstorm, and incus in Latin just means anvil. 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, oh, shoot,

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 like for a convective cloud, it's because you of you know, sort of warm air that gets like buoyant, it's warmed in there 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, and therefore the air gets colder.

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 dew 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 dew 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 dew point 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. That's 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 those 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, do you look for faces in clouds? Do you still look for 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 stare 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 is it Cerrus? So Cirrus 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 cloud 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 have so many Patreon questions.

Are you ready? Yes?

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 food and water to critters in impacted regions. They use Koala detection dogs to help rescue them and to find other

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Mom, why did they call it Scottish cheese?

It's cottage cheese, honey. And I'm not sure.

Dogs in other countries speak different languages.

Yeah, I think so.

When when we get there.

Well, we've got to fix the car first, but there's someone coming.

To help us.

Is it the man from Geneva?

Not Geneva, he's from a Viva. Oh, there's the van.

Now.

For car insurance with breakdown rescue, it takes Aviva visit a Viva dan I eat to say fifty percent acceptance criteria, terms and conditions apply. Minimum premium of three hundred and ten yuar oh. Fifteen percent discant applies to new policies bought online. See Aviva dot i E for details. Car insurance is underwritten by Aviva Insurance Ireland dak A Viva direct Arland Limited is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

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Okay, back to your cloud questions. Okay, wants to know why your cloud's white.

H Yeah.

I started out this a little bit earlier, because you have a lot of droplets all in the same place, and the light bounces off of them and gets scattered.

I guess they at an all the.

Different directions, and so that that looks to our eyes like white.

Basically, huh.

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. It turns out the explanation is nephological in nature, So can you please explain? And Jack Pourier and Courtney Ryan also have those questions about why is it cloud in the winter.

Yeah, so, I mean I'm from Pennsylvania originally, and so I know the great skies of winter. 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 clouds, 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

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 use it. A lot of people, of course, want to know about climate change. Emily, Elaine Laboard, Nikaia Wooten, who's a first time question asker, Haley Everson first time question asker.

Also Sarah Does.

And Jay, Julie bear Schminnie Thompson, and JANEU. 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 pattern 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 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.

Hoof Yeah, I know that this is probably a question. You get a lot 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 great way to get people to understand the difference, you know. Elizabeth Ganie wants to know why do cumulo nimbus clouds appear to us as such crazy colors like yellow and green and purple.

So it depends on sort of what's in them and how the lightest gattering. Like the darker that a cloud is usually the more stuff, isn't 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 cumulinimous cloud will tend to look greenish, and often that means that there's hail in it.

What because of just the hail.

Is really big and it just scatters light in a different way. And so a lot of times, like if there's hail in a cloud, it'll have this sort.

Of greenish 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.

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

Yeah, I've heard red skies at night sailors delight light.

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 cirrus 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

Yeah, so it's not necessarily about the heaviness of the cloud. It's 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 enough heavy enough to fall through their ballpark. Like a rain drop is like I don't know, a millimeter or something like that.

Okayish oh. 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.

Melissa Croce 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 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 rain 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 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 ow, 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 crumpy, 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.

Well, I would say that you were a ray of sunshine, but you're really I feel like that's an insult in your work. So you're just 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, it's I love them so as always meet smart people and then invite them and to ask them questions. And we're at ologies on Twitter, Come be friends with us on that and on Instagram We're at ologies. Also linked is aliwar dot com slash Asmologies, which has dozens more kids Safe

Okay, bybye.

Our Saugy.

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