Are you interested in lucid dreaming or ball lightning? How about the feet of geckos or spiders? The aquatic ape? Cave art? Maybe you like clouds. You might have a fascination with out-of-body or near-death experiences, collective nouns or synesthesia. You can find all that here. Just use the handy little search bar.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but mostly this website exists as a place for the Green Comet trilogy and my other novels to live.
rjb
Credit UuMUfQ – CC-BY-SA
I mentioned nimbostratus in the Cloud of the Day post on altostratus, but I think it deserves a post of its own. It is a stratiform cloud that typically forms on a warm front. As advancing warm air rises over the retreating colder, denser air, we see the classical progression of cloud types. As the warm front approaches, we see the highest clouds first. Wisps of cirrus, maybe a layer of cirrostratus, complete with a halo, and cirrocumulus. Then, the closer the warm front gets, the lower the clouds we see. The middle etage clouds, altocumulus, and altostratus, perhaps even altocumulus castellanus, are next. Finally come the stratocumulus, stratus and the various forms of cumulus.
Public Domain
Credit Indrajit Das – CC-BY-SA
Credit Fir0002 – CC-BY-SA
“Enchanted Light | New Mexico” by Jim Crotty is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
It looks as if the jet stream might be thinking of moving into its usual summer position, which is well to the north of us. When that happens we settle in for that long period of summer heat that we’ve usually had, or at least begun by now. This year, though, the jet stream seems to have stalled with an arm of it looping down to the west of us. That means there’s an avenue for a series of weather systems to pass nearby or right over us. Hence the lower temperatures and wetter weather.
The fire suppression crews got control of the big fire that was threatening to come over the mountain and descend on us. Those people are champs.
One of these times I’m going to have to talk about the deep duff.
rjb
“Enchanted Light | New Mexico” by Jim Crotty is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Already we have surpassed the average rainfall for July, at only the three-quarter mark. This has allowed the drought level to be reduced from 3 to 2. That means our conditions have gone from “very dry” to “dry.”
What has Droughtman got to say about this? He says that 2019 has been very rainy, even though July has been the only month this spring/summer to reach normal levels of precipitation. He reiterates that the big lakes have a lot of water. To his credit, this time he didn’t say that means there’s no drought. Maybe he forgot to mention it.
Here’s hoping this unusually cool and wet July continues and carries over into August. It has been a nice change and we can use it. The wildfire hazard is down, a relief after the last two years of big fires. If we keep getting rain, maybe the aquifers will have a chance to recharge. With higher temperatures in the forecast, it would be good to build up a bit of a buffer.
We had a splendid thunderstorm pass through last night, with near-continuous lightning and some rain. Hopefully the lightning-caused fires can be knocked down before they do too much damage.
Don’t stop now, rain.
rjb
Credit Craig Sunter – CC-BY
To be misunderstood is bad enough. To then be used as back-up for some wingnut’s conspiracy theory is going too far.
rjb
ISBN 978-0-9919532-0-2
