Oh hey, it's that lady who's both a stranger and also your internet dad, Alie 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 kids and it's safer all ages.
If you are looking for the full version of clouds and you got some more time and you're not around Smologies, then the full length version is linked in the show notes. But if you're here for the smaller shorter episodes that are cheerated, enjoy. Okay, this is a big one. It has been looming overhead since the first time I encountered a list of possible Ologies. This was 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... So, of course, you know I'm pumped to get my head into the clouds for this. Okay, Nephology. It's a 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 Neph 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 pea organs, which we will explore another time. I promise. Okay, so thisologist, this Nephologist, I happened upon on Twitter and she was like, came me up for that cloud chat any time. I was thrilled. I was nervous. She came over to my house. I sat on my couch with my sleeping indoor raccoon, Grammy, just inches away.
We looked out at the atmosphere while we discussed what is a cloud. What are they called and why? What ancient weather addages can we actually rely on? Diamond rain and clouds shaped like everything under the sun with atmospheric scientists. Professional cloud looker at her and Nephologist Dr. Rachel Storer. 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 Nephrologist a lot, but they don't even call you a Nephologist.
No, nobody calls me that. Some of my friends call me a cloud doctor, which I use that one for some of my social media and stuff. I just think that sounds neat. A cloud 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. So if you look at a regular cloud, I think I'm going to probably get the numbers wrong, but it literally can be like a ton of water in a cloud.
But the droplets are just so small and they just can 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. It's just an absolute ton of water above your head. The reason it's a cloud and not a puddle is I don't know. So all the droplets are really small. I mean literally like tens of microns across this 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 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 bullied by the air underneath it.
Yeah, sort of like eventually there's just enough water and the more water you have in a cloud, the more the water is going to bump against other water droplets and they start to stick together and water people 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 types that 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 it surroundings and it bubbles up. Like you would have bubbles in boiling water or whatever you just have air that bubbles up. So they tend to be like poofy and bumpy on the top and stuff like that.
And those are the ones that tend to, if you're going to have storms, those are convective clouds. So those are the puffy, fluffy cotton candy clouds are the cumulus and then there's the stratus. Yeah. So stratus literally the word like stratum 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 and then you tend to get like stratochemulus over the ocean or if it's like a really rainy, drizzly day, a lot of times that will be like they'll be like a front coming through that's sort of larger and so there's, you know, a big air mass that's just sort of moving slowly up and so you get sort of these flat sort of layered clouds. Oh, so it's like a pancake is this stratus cloud and that cumulus is a muffin?
Yes. Okay. Yeah. So this maybe would a stratochemulus be like a waffle? Sure. Okay. Why not? I'm hungry. And so then okay. What are some other types of clouds? Like what is a like a pyroclastic cloud or a linticular? Like what are all these terms? So pyrochemulus clouds are really cool and also terrifying and kind of sad because they're what happens when you have fire pyro, right? So pyrochemulus is basically when you get so much heat from the fire that it forces convection on its own.
Yes. 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 that air rises and then the cooler air above it falls.
Like that gets heated by the earth, that rises, etc, etc. Which let's be honest is almost as cool as cookies. That's pretty interesting. Now pyrochemulus or flamagenitis clouds have terrible names but they look like fluffy, puffy, billowy, pillowy steam clouds. And so you get these really strong, like really crazy cauliflowery convectionies sort of clouds that form. I mean, I've seen them here over the mountains sometimes occasionally when we've gotten bad fires. Oh my god.
What about a lenticular cloud? Lenticular clouds are awesome. But a lenticular cloud is a wave cloud. So it forms when air is forced over a mountain. And so if the 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 UFO 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 if you ever look at like pictures of like Mount Rainier in Washington sometimes they'll form like on top of the mountain and you'll get this like really cool like layered and it's hard to describe with just words but I'm going to look it up. Yeah. Y'all are you sitting? Have you seen a lenticular cloud? They look like skypancakes or UFOs or like stacks of Hanukkah gelt and the word lenticular comes from lens shaped like a bulging disc of a lens.
So 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 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 Annville 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 amazing.
Okay. So Kimi Loonimbus is like a thunderstorm basically. So fancy name. Yeah. And then Annville 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 until they spread out. And that's where and it's they're called Annville clouds because if you look at this shape of them where they sort of like peek out and point out or whatever they look sort of like an Annville. Oh my god. Yeah. Okay. Quick aside, I looked them up and these thunderstorms do in fact look like Annville's and their full name is Kimi Loonimbus Incas and the Kimi Loon means heaped.
So they're like a bunch of heaps of whipped cream and the Nimbus means rain storm and Incas in Latin just means Annville. So when this rising air hits the tropopause that's the boundary between the lowest level of atmosphere and the next level stratosphere. So the cloud hits that and it was like, oh shoot, that's a ceiling. Okay. I'm just going to casually fan out and act normal. Hopefully nobody noticed. It doesn't even know how cool it is. How does the cloud even form?
You need the sort of basics that you need are moisture and something for the moisture you 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 warm in the air 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, dew 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 dew 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 dew 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 is the temperature that water would start to condense and a 50 degree dew point is pretty comfy, but a 70 degree dew point is just getting into swamp bottom territory. Now living in LA, this dew point info was new to me. I had not the fogiest 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. Foggy is just a cloud that's touching the ground. It's literally all it is. How far does it have to go before it's a cloud, just above your head? Is it a philosophical or a meteorological question? I mean, I think it's one of those fuzzy things because it's funny. If you fly through a cloud, when are you in the cloud and when are you not in the cloud?
Because there's all these little water droplets. And at some point it's enough that you can see it. But if you look at it with a light R, there's a lot more that you can't see because it's just too small or too sparse or whatever. So at what point is it a cloud versus not a cloud? It's not like there's weird hard boundaries. So, you know, touching the ground versus not like, you know, give a wiggle room. Okay. Do you look for faces and 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 a god 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 are these today? These are stratus? Those are serus. What is a serus? So, serus 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 serus, the middle ones are like altos. So we have like altos 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 this guy it is. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have so many Patreon questions. Are you ready? Yeah, sure.
Okay. She is ready. But first, before your Patreon questions, each week we make a donation to a cause of theologist 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 co-oholid detection dogs to help rescue them and to find other threatened species. And they get supplies to triage sites. So thank you, Rachel, for picking that. And that donation is made possible by sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now. Okay. Back to your cloud questions. Okay. Once to know why your cloud's white.
Yeah. It sort of 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 they had in all of the different directions. And so that looks to our eyes like white, basically. Oh. First time question, ask her. Navarro. Once 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 in Google that the other day turns out the explanation is nephological in nature. So can you please explain and Jack Poiret and Courtney Ryan also have those questions about why is it clouding the winter? Yeah. So I mean, I'm from Pennsylvania originally and so I know I know the great skies of winter. Yeah, so a lot of it is just the kind of clouds that tend to form. So a lot of like the stratus clouds, like I said, form on 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. So a lot of the stuff is just stratacy overcasts or stuff.
I'm from San Francisco and I just call that sunscreen. I myself a foggy day. Oh, sup weather. JK JK. The Skin Cancer Foundation says that up to 80% 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 Laborde. Nakeda Wooten, who's a first time question asker. Haley Everson, first time question asker, also Sarah Des.
And Jay, Julie Bear, Shminny Thompson and J.N.U. 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? Ooh, 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, it can shift climate patterns around.
Places that maybe weren't warm enough for there to be a lot of conductive clouds might get more of those or it can shift where the main storm track regions happen. And then there's also over the oceans, there's these large stradocumulus layers and there's a lot of open questions as to how those will change. There wouldn't be a cloud that would go extinct. That would make me very sad. But it's just more about small shifts.
And the important thing there is how that affects the radiation because there's all these feedbacks with warming and how that affects the precipitation. Those are the more important questions for what we actually want to understand. 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 rich get richer idea where the places that are moist will get moisture and the places that are dry will get drier which is unfortunate. Right? If you live in a place that's prone to flooding, you don't want more that. And if you live in California, you don't want more drought. There's a lot of indications that that might be the way things are going. 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 that is like they have all these distrust of the models that we use. Or people will just be like, oh, it's cold. Where's that global warming? Right. So there's a lot of really cool analogies for it that I try to remember.
But so 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. That's a great way to get people to understand the difference. Elizabeth Gagne wants to know, why do cumulonimbus clouds appear to us as such crazy colors like yellow and green and purple? So it depends on what's in them and how the lightest 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 more moisture in that cloud. Right. Like if it rains, the clouds overhead are usually really dark gray. Sometimes, cumulonimbus cloud will tend to look greenish and often that means that there's hail in it. What? Because of just the hails are 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 tinged to it. Oh my god.
And then if you get clouds like on the horizon at 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 sails at night, sailors to light, red sails in the mourn, sailors to be warned? Have you heard that? It's, yeah, I've heard red skies at night. There's still 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 past where you'll see like sear's clouds and 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.
And 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 lot of water in the atmosphere. End quote.
So red skies in the morning, gather your galoshes, which means if you live in LA, you start canceling your plants. We don't do rain. Lauren Kiprell wants to know how heavy does a cloud need to be before it rains. 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 droplet has to be certain sort of a certain size before it's big enough heavy enough to fall through the air. Ballpark, like a rain drop is like, I don't know, a millimeter or something like that. Okay. Fish. And door to says at my son, Shay, who's nine and is a first time ask her, 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 air is always moving around and stuff like that. Plus, there's like all this sort of like chaotic stuff that happens on the small scale in clouds where, you know, just because you have sort of similar conditions right here, they won't be exactly the same 10 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 Crocy wants to know first time question, ask her, 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 and 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 2.2 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? You know what's funny about that is when I picture it raining diamonds, I picture it like cut gemstones and not just rocks. Resentations.
There's an after sort of doctor who I think where there's like something like that sort of diamond planet. Like they're already cut and polished like a diamond emoji. I picture the same thing. Yeah. And you're like, ow, ow. What do you love the most about clouds or your work or about being a nephologist, which you now 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 this guy 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 need in the group that will be like outside, like huddled on the side.
Like, oh my gosh, there's actual weather. Well, I would say that you're array of sunshine, but you're really, 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? It's I love them. So as always, meet smart people and then invite them in to ask them questions. And we're at Oligis on Twitter. Come be friends with us on that.
And on Instagram, we're at Oligis also linked is alleyward.com slash small a cheese, which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through and thank you Mercedes mainland of mainland audio and Jared sleeper of mind jam media for editing those as well as Zeeck Rodriguez Thomas. And since we like to keep things small around here, the rest of the credits are in the show notes. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I give you a piece of advice.
And this week's advice is to have a little note going when you hear someone mention that they like something and you can jot it down that way when their birthday rolls around or they need a little surprise treat to make their day, you say, Oh, that's right. They love bubble gum or oh, that's right. Gunicorn stickers are their favorite. That way in the moment you don't have to rack your brain for something to get them. I keep a list going of things that my loved ones like that way.
I remember when their birthday comes around where to start when it comes to a gift. Sometimes I make a little list of things that I want a couple weeks before my birthday. That way if anyone asked me when I went for my birthday, I say, Oh, I remember. And there are a few little tiny treats that I'd like. Okay. Bye. We're going to meet another beautiful couple.