The Weather From Aloft

THE WEATHER FROM ALOFT
April 26 & April 28
I just finished watching the movie “The Weatherman”. Nicholas Cage does a fine job portraying a television meteorologist who is constantly pelted with fast food from moving cars for no other reason except he predicted unacceptable weather.
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by weather. One of the first things I do when I get up every morning is download the weather for the next several days from the Internet. I access two reliable weather sites, and combine the data into one report. This I print off and hang on the refrigerator in the kitchen. I have a need to know what the weather is going to be, so I can plan my activities accordingly.
Much of this interest in weather comes from my past life on a farm, when the weather for the day played an important role in determining whether we should be drawing in hay, or conversely, sticking close to the barn. If thunderstorms were in the forecast, then we really didn’t want to be in the south forty. We learned to read cloud formations, what they meant and generally concluded that often they were more reliable than the weather report itself.
I still check out the clouds, but over the years, I have sort of lost my touch. Several years ago, I was one of the first people in the county to spot a most unusual cloud formation in the sky. I became alarmed and phoned the radio station and the newspapers, but couldn’t seem to generate much concern or excitement. But the clouds did excite me, as I remember friends of ours who went through the devastating Barrie tornado in 1985, describing these same clouds. Problem was, I couldn’t remember if the cloud formation came before the tornado, after it, or during the tornado!
The clouds in question were called mammatus clouds, and I have seen them only one other time since, and always during the presence of volatile weather. For lack of a better description, the sky above resembles a large heavy sheet of dark bubble plastic, symmetrically arranged pouch-like clouds hanging downward, with the joints appearing as light coloured membranes where sunlight has been able to filter through. Why the peculiar shape? Think of it as convection in reverse. Unstable air is being forced downward, rather than upward, resulting from moisture and heat flowing out from a cumulonimbus anvil over the neighbouring undisturbed air. That’s those huge, towering cauliflower cloud formations we often see during periods of really disturbing weather systems. I have a photo of one that I took over Picton once that everyone who views it agrees resembles a white poodle sitting up on its haunches, begging !
Two hundred years ago, people seldom paid any attention to clouds, or understood what they meant. Clouds had no names and were nothing more than “essences” floating in the sky. As time went on, some people began paying attention to cloud formations, relating them to weather that these clouds would ultimately bring. Soon, clouds took on names, eventually assuming three basic groups – cumulus, stratus and cirrus. From these three main cloud families developed “sub-species” for lack of a better term.
Sometimes though, even the best read skies can generate surprises. On a kayaking trip one early summer day, the sky was a dazzling blue with not a wisp of cloud to be seen anywhere. Even the weather report was promising. The water was as smooth as silk, and one person even commented on my “ability” to pick the weather for these trips. As we ate lunch on a small island in the middle of this remote lake, a few innocent wisps of grey appeared on the horizon and as we started our hour paddle back to our vehicles, distant thunder signalled what started out as a passing storm that would easily skirt by us. Half way back, the wind changed and approached gale force, white caps formed and we became surrounded by fierce lightning, torrential rain and even some hail. As we approached the boat ramp some 30 minutes later, the sun came out. The skies fooled even me this time, or I managed to miss something having been out of practice for so many years.
Besides clouds, there are other ways we can predict weather in the offing, such as animal behaviour,. Some are just myths, but others have sound explanations. Birds and bats have a tendency to fly much lower to the ground right before a rain due to the “thinning” of the air. They prefer to fly where the air is more dense and can achieve greater lift with their wings. With high pressure and dry air, the atmosphere becomes denser and they can easily fly at higher altitudes. Sound too becomes sharper and more focused prior to stormy weather. Instead of traveling upward and outward into the atmosphere, sound waves are bent back to the earth and their range extended. Even birdcalls sound sharper. Aching bones and joints are not just figments of our imagination. The pain is due to the decreasing atmospheric pressure allowing the gas in our bodies to expand.
So, which is the best method, in this day of computers and Doppler radar? Hints from Nature itself, or a trained meteorologist? As Nicholas Cage retorted when a fan asked him what the weather forecast was going to be, “Who knows? It’s just wind ! Wind blowing everything around !”