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Mackerel Sky versus Carp Sky

I'm stealing an argument from this book regarding what is called the Mackerel Sky and what he wants to call Carp Sky. To start, the two fish (pictures from Wikipedia):

Mackerel

and Carp

Note the striations of the mackerel versus the scaly pattern on the carp. Now, the clouds. The first two were taken by myself, and the last one by my mother up in Rochester.



The clouds I saw are much more similar to a carp than a mackerel, and therefore are altocumulous stratiformis perlucidus (middle-height puffy clouds that extend over a large area with gaps inbetween), while the clouds that my mother sent look more like the mackerel. However, they are still middle-height clouds. The size of the individual cloudlets are about the width of a finger (which would indicate altocumulous), rather than the size of grains of salt (which would indicate cirrocumulus). So I'd still call the Rochester clouds Carp Sky, but with more of an undulating pattern than the ones over Ithaca.

I will keep my eye out for a better example of a Mackerel Sky.

From Rochester - Some shots of a developing storm

My mother up in Rochester sent me these pictures last night. The first photo came with an explanation that it snowed a little, with some possible hail. And the first photo matches up: it's clearly Pannus, an accessory cloud that unambiguously declare the threat of precipitation. They live below big, beastly, cumulonimbus clouds, which are the ones that actually generate the rain.



These other photos are taken later, and I would imagine my mom drove...south I want to say, turned around and snapped these photos. In the foreground, there are some clear cumulus clouds (low, billowy, pillow-like) and in the background I would guess it's a cumulonimbus capillatus: a big storm cloud with a wispy, icy, striated anvil on top. There's rain on the ground, so I would guess that these photos are the back end of the cloud and it moves north. The storm cloud recedes into the distance.







Thanks Mom!

Walking back from campus - twice

Some cumulus clouds and a little bit of rain that doesn't reach the ground.



Maybe altostratus undulatus? (Undulatus = undulating = wavy pattern)

Altocumulus Floccus

The quotes are from Charles Bowden 'Contested Ground' in the Nov/Dec 2009 Issue of Orion. The clouds are from this last weekend, and are Altocumulus Floccus, with a good shot of a fallstreak hole, all whispy and out of place in the big sky of flocci.

"Science cannot be kept safe from poetry, the cyclotron must deal with St. Francis and his Little Flowers, and the wolf cannot escape the forces of the lupines blue with spring."



"......millions then billions of years stroke the ball spinning in space and none of this is considered as important as winning the West, pioneering, conquest, civilization, but all these small moments are details in the long chords of time pealing through nights and days. Sometimes our ideas of history look more like neurosis than an appetite for understanding."



"......the books arrive -- those histories -- and all this is tidied up and made sense of, history becomes the final suicide where we block ourselves off from the earth, from the ancestors, from ourselves, and from hungers that feed our dread......"

Stratus (Fractus?) Opacus

Woke up this morning to a low layer of clouds, clearly stratus.

The view from the valley floor:

The view from campus, looking down over Ithaca:

No sign of the sun (hence opacus). No rain, but a diffuse mist that condensed on my glasses. Maybe a little bit fractus (see the darker clouds?).

Stratus Fractus Opacus

Tis the season of sundogs. Keep your eyes peeled!