Ologies with Alie Ward - Nephology (CLOUDS) with Rachel Storer

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Cumulus! Lenticular! Venti sugar-free stratocumulus stratiformis translucidus undulatus! Those light and fluffy things that hang overhead weigh thousands of pounds and form under all kinds of conditions. Cloud doctor and nephologist Dr. Rachel Storer chats about why she loves clouds, the different varieties of them, weather modification, sun dogs, bad emojis, tornado chasing, flim flam, conspiracy theories, cloud tattoos and diamond rain. Also: the common factor in whoopee cushions, boob implants and your lunch. Follow Dr. Rachel Storer at Twitter.com/cloudsinmybeer A donation went to: WWF's Australian Wildlife and Nature Recovery Fund Sponsor links: TakeCareOf.com (code: ologies50); TheGreatCoursesPLUS.com/OLOGIES; betterhelp.com/ologies More links at alieward.com/ologies/nephology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's that lady who's both a stranger and also your internet dad, Allie Ward, back with a light and a fluffy episode of oligies. Okay, this is a big one. It has been looming overhead since the first time I encountered a list of possible oligies. 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 meteorology, nephology, nephology. So of course, you know, I'm pumped as hell to get my head into the clouds for this. But first per usual, thank you to everyone on Patreon supporting the show and to everyone sporting oligies gear from oligiesmerch.com. And if you want to contribute for $0, you can just make sure you're subscribed. Just do that. You can text like three friends, tell them, hey, listen to this dumb show. You can rate it on Apple podcasts.

You can leave a review, which keeps it among the NPR beasts at the top of the charts. And also, you know, I read them all because I'm a creep. And this week, thank you to Elsa0219 for this one. They said, this podcast is insanely interesting, even when the topic is something I don't typically have an interest in. Super smart people making super complicated information much more accessible. Hopefully these nerds will rule the world because they clearly have their shit together more than I do.

I doubt that. Also, 0219, you left a review. Clearly, you've got it together. And I appreciate it. Okay, nephology is 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 it's 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 P organs, which we will explore another time. I promise. Okay, so this nephologist. I happened upon on Twitter and I found out she was based in LA, a million DJ horns. And there's a pretty tiny number of professional cloud scientists in the world.

She says that conferences are like family reunions. And she was like, hit me up for that cloud chat anytime. I was thrilled. I was nervous. She came over to my house just this past week, just this past Friday. This is a lightning fast turnaround, folks. We sat on my couch with my sleeping indoor raccoon, Grammy, just inches away. And we looked out at the atmosphere while we discussed what is a cloud?

What are they called and why? Are chemtrails real? What ancient weather adages can we actually rely on? Could you chase storms, diamond rain and clouds shaped like everything under the sun along with which emojis are the most annoying with atmospheric scientist, professional cloud looker adder and nephologist, Dr. Rachel Storer. These are just like, uh, my friends, you told them like this? Okay, so pretty close.

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. 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 cloud doctor cloud. How long have you been studying clouds or how long? When did you, when did this start? Oh gosh. Well, I mean, I've kind of always loved storms. You know, like I grew up in Pennsylvania and we would get great thunderstorms in the summer and stuff like that.

And like my mom and I would sit out in the porch and stick our feet out in the rain and, you know, count between the thunder and the lightning and everything. So I've always been fascinated by it. I remember, but like when I was, I was probably 12 or something like that when twister came out. Oh, I saw that at theaters. I gotta go Julia, we got cows. Yeah. So I think like a lot of people in my field around my age,

like that was one of those like, oh my gosh, this movie is amazing. And then right around that time, TLC used to have all these specials about tornadoes and tornado chasing and all this stuff. And I was like, what, like this could be my job is to like study storms. Yeah. So yeah, my undergrad was in meteorology and then I did atmospheric science for grad school and I've been doing that ever since. Oh my gosh.

Okay. How much of a cloud badass is Rachel? Well, she is an author on papers such as effects of convective micro physics parameterization on large scale cloud hydrological cycle and radiative budget in tropical and mid latitude convective regions. And she got her bachelor's in meteorology from Penn State, which is a big weather school, and did a summer project about aerosols. What the hell is an aerosol? You're asking.

Well, I asked Google for us and it's a teeny tiny thing that floats in the air or some other gas and it can be a solid or a liquid like dust or water or pollutants or geyser mist or snot droplets, which by the way, the latter are called bio aerosols. So if someone sneezes on you and apologize to say aerosol, good man. Just kidding. That's disgusting. Please cover your mouth. No offense.

Now she got a degree in meteorology, but there are lots of topics under the meteorology umbrella, if you will, I'm sorry. And she ended up getting her master's and PhD in atmospheric science in Colorado. And part of that was just a really lucky link between that summer project she did. And so when I went to Colorado State for grad school, it turned out that the woman who I was working with, she was doing research into how aerosols affect storms. There you go. Yeah.

Living in LA, we get like four clouds a year. I know. How do you feel about that? It's really sad. I've gotten to the point where I can get like really psyched by like drizzle. Your standards just go lower. Yeah. Yeah.

You got to shake what you can get. Just side note for context, LA does not have a lot of clouds. Let's get to the nitty-gritty. What the fuck 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 shit 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 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 bullied 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 going to bump against other water droplets and they start to stick together and, you know, water vapor 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. Okay, so let's talk about shapes of clouds.

Okay, the sort of two main types you said 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 its surroundings and it bubbles up like, like you would have bubbles in boiling water or whatever. You just, you have air that bubbles up. And so that's sort of why 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 that those are convective clouds, or you'll just get like the little sort of one of my friends calls them the symptoms clouds.

Yes, I was going to ask about that. Like it's funny if I ever see a really puffy cumulus cloud. I instantly think of this. So those are the puffy fluffy cotton candy clouds or the cumulus. And then there's the 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 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 stratocumulus over the ocean. Or if it's like a really rainy drizzly day, a lot of times that will be like, there'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 a stratus cloud and a cumulus is a muffin. Yes.

Okay, I'll take it. And then I guess maybe would a stratocumulus 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 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. P.S. 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, et cetera, et cetera. Which, let's be honest, is almost as cool as cookies. That's pretty interesting. Now pyrocumulus or flamagenetous clouds have terrible names, but they look like fluffy, puffy, billowy, pillowy steam clouds. I'm talking steamy. And so you get these really strong like really crazy cauliflowery

convection-y sort of clouds that form. I mean, I've seen them here over the mountains sometimes, occasionally when we've gotten bad fires. And if you look at like right now, if you look at like satellite imagery over Australia, you can see pyrocumulus clouds. Oh my god. What about a lenticular cloud? Lenticular clouds are awesome.

We don't get them a lot around here. Sometimes if you if you drive a little bit farther east towards the mountains, you can see them. 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 large wave.

And in the parts where it goes up, a cloud will form if 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 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 a really cool like layered. 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 sky pancakes or UFOs or like stacks of Hanukkah guilt. 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 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. And side note, they published a book called Cloud Spotting, which is just a bunch of cool cloud photos and descriptions.

So if you two have ever stopped to snap a photo of a cloud, there's a place for us on this earth. How many cloud pictures do you have on your phone? Like so many. Oh, so many. Really? Oh, yeah. Do you, when you're driving, have you ever pulled over to take pictures of weather?

I mean, I've been storm chasing, which is a whole different story in terms of driving and pulling over and looking at weather. Wait, when did you go storm chasing? Oh, when I lived in Colorado. But what does that involve? Chasing storms. How do you know if it's going to be safe to do so? Are you, are you running?

You're running, obviously, toward it, not away from, right? Toward it, yeah. Well, ideally, you sort of place yourself in the right positions that it will go just past you so that you can watch it. And does that involve lightning and thunder and also rain? Oh, yeah, everything. Yeah. I mean, ideally, tornadoes, but it's hard to find a tornado.

Ideally, tornadoes. That sentence not said often. I'm sure. Well, you know, we're sort of a special breed. Now, other people who study clouds, what are you guys doing when you're studying clouds? What does it mean to be a cloud doctor? My research specifically is, like I said, on sort of storms, cumulonimbus, deep convective clouds, however you want to name them.

And I look at a lot of like basic things about how much water is moving around in the storm within the sort of main updraft of the storm and then out of the top into the anvil clouds and try to understand how the environment impacts that. So if it's, you know, if it's warmer or if it's moisture in like certain layers of the atmosphere, how does that feed back onto how the storm behaves? Now, does that help people understand just general meteorology and like weather prediction? Yeah. So it's sort of, it's sort of this basic fundamental stuff that I'm into, which is,

for me, just I love to answer the questions about it. And then, yeah, ideally, if I learn something worthwhile, then it could help, yeah, make models better for prediction or for climate models or whatever. Do you trust forecasts? Yeah, you do. Yeah, our forecasts are actually really good out to a few days and they've gotten, you know, there's specific ways people score them and stuff like that. And they've gotten better over the years even.

Like if you look at like, I don't know, something like 20 years ago, like a four day forecast now is as good as a three day forecast was then or something like that. Like we've gotten even better as we've gotten better models and more compute power and things like that. Yeah. 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 amazing.

Okay. So Cumulo Nimbus is like a thunderstorm, basically. It's a fancy name. 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 until they spread out. And that's where, and it's, they're called Anvil Clouds. Because if you look at the shape of them where they sort of like peek out and point out or whatever, they look sort of like an Anvil. Oh my God. Yeah.

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 cumulon means heaped. So they're like a bunch of heaps of whipped 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 was like, oh, shit, 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 to 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 sort of warm air that gets buoyant. It's warmer than the air around it. Or like I said, if you have air that's moving over a 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. That's like ideal gas law, basic sort of stuff. The ideal gas law side note is an equation and it's PV equals nRT. Now P is the pressure of the gas times the volume taken up by the gas and those multiplied equal its temperature times the gas constant times the number of moles of the gas. What's my point? My point is a professional nephrologist does all kinds of computer modeling and physics and stuff on a whiteboard and doesn't just get to stare at the sky and say,

it's a chill fucking cloud, man. 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 foggiest idea. And when does something become a cloud if it's foggy?

If you know what I mean? Is fog a cloud? Fog is a cloud. Fog is just a cloud that's touching the ground. Literally all it is, yeah. How far does it have to go before it's a cloud? Just above your head? Is that 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 lidar, 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, right? It's not like there's weird hard boundaries. Right.

So touching the ground versus not like, give me a wiggle room. What is it like for you when you're flying and you fly through clouds and you burst through and you're like, what is, is that always a more fun for you? Are you always like on the window seat? I like the window seat a lot. I try to plan it depending on what time my flight is. If I'm flying in the middle of the day, I'm going to try it for the window seat for sure. If I'm flying over the middle of the country so I can see some storms.

Otherwise, I'll do the aisle because I like to pee a lot. You're like, I'm well hydrated. So if it's a nighttime thing, why do clouds cause so much turbulence? Because where there is clouds, it means that there's a lot of air moving around. It's sort of a chicken and egg thing because you're going to have more clouds where there's air going up, but also clouds themselves because there's sort of evaporation and condensation happening. It's like you're going over little waves in the ocean almost, right?

Where if you are in a pocket of air that goes down pretty quickly, then the plane will get forced down a little bit, right? Have you ever seen people during minor turbulence freaking out and you want to just be like, yo, I'm a cloud doctor. Is there a cloud doctor on this plane? You're like, I am and it's going to be fine. I am careful about whether I tell people what I do or not sometimes on the plane. What kind of questions do strangers ask you the most?

Oh, well, I get ridiculous conspiracy theory things. People are all about chemtrails. Is there something I believe in, calmly, in chemtrails? I have seen them. I know they're real. I've seen chemtrails. Let's break it down. I was going to ask you about that.

I mean, chemtrails are definitely chemicals that are being spread by the government to make us stupid, right? Yeah, they help read our minds and they make us docile. Oh, cool. That's what I thought. No, what people do think that about when they see contrails from jets, right? Yep. And then you'll see these.

You can go down a rabbit hole like YouTube videos where people just like will post like any picture of a cloud that looks like at all weird and they'll be like, see, it's proof. And that's a chemtrail. Wow. Do you look for faces in clouds? Or is that something that you abandoned as a child? Do you still look for shapes in clouds?

I don't really go out of my way too. I mean, if I see it, I'll take note of it or whatever. But I tend to, I mean, I tend to just sort of like stare a dog 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 cirrus. What the fuck is a cirrus? 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 clouds or whatever. And so the higher up ones are cirrus.

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 mean, yeah, if you look at like the actual, you could find like there's like a cloud appreciation society that has, there's like all sorts of different, yeah. The names get like ridiculous in terms of like how specific it gets for different kinds of clouds.

I cannot keep track. Okay. So let me pause for a minute just to tell you that she is not kidding. If you have ever stared into the mirror loathing yourself for not knowing what different cloud names mean, call your therapist and tell them you're healed because guess what? You are not alone. Cloud names, they're numerous and they're long and they're confusing. Like not even a rare professional nephrologist can grasp them all.

But I'm here to lead us through the haze. So first off, let's all pour a little fog juice on the ground for the late Luke Howard. He was a 19th century botanist turned meteorologist who conceived of this system of cloud nomenclature. The dude loved clouds and he published this opus, the essay on the modification of clouds in 1803. And in it, he was like, hey, clouds, clouds are not just water vapor in this guy, blown willy nilly by the winds, all right. Clouds come from the earth's temperature and all kinds of factors.

We need to come correct and have a naming system for them. Have a little respect for clouds. So he turned to Latin roots and hence high clouds are cirrus and that means curl or hair and they're way up there and they're pretty chilly. They're made of super cold water vapor or even ice crystals. And the middle clouds are alto, which means high and low clouds are stratus, meaning layer. Now, why is alto in the middle? I don't know.

Why does Starbucks call a small at all beats me, dude? And actually, you know what? I swear looking at this cloud naming is less complicated than a Starbucks order. And just like a latte, you can customize. So the Howard method, remember, he's the granddaddy of clouds, has a bunch of sub, sub categories like cumulus, which means hippie, whipped cream clouds, stratus can mean low or sheet like either one, whatever. Nimbostratus, for example, is a low rain cloud.

Before you know it, stratocumulus, stratiformus, trans lucidus, undulatus, it's as familiar and soothing as a triple venti-sugar-free oat milk caramel macchiato. You're like, I get it. Also, shout out to the Kelvin Helmholtz clouds, which look super oceanic like cartoons of the sea. They look exactly like the Billabong logo, I swear, but it's not sponsored by Billabong. Let's just debunk that right now. Now, what other myths are floating around out there? One thing that I get picky about is that the bottom of clouds is generally pretty flat.

So if you look at a field of cumulus clouds, we call them fair weather cumulus, just the nice little puffy Simpsons clouds, they generally will have a pretty flat base and they're all at the same height. And so when people draw clouds and they're all poofy at the bottom too, I'm just like, oh. You're like, you don't get it. You don't get it. By the by, after we stopped recording, Rachel mentioned that she has a cloud tattoo on her left shoulder blade and she said the design was really important and she had to work with

the artist to make sure that the cloud was flat on the bottom. As a nephrologist, that was very critical. And also the morning we recorded this, her husband, Eric, had texted her a good luck gif of a cloud and in his text, she showed me that he apologized for its shape, which was puffy on the bottom. He's like, listen, I know this is an insult to clouds, but the sentiment is there. Also, as a graduate of that prominent meteorology program at Penn State, what else peeves her? You know, I get pretty arched when people would do the whole like,

oh, you get paid to be wrong half the time, that sort of thing. Oh. That's one of those that sticks in your car because you're like, oh, you don't even know. We do so well. It's like confirmation bias that you remember the one time that they screw up. Right. But like, really, like, would you pretty well? Like, you generally know whether you should bring an umbrella or not, you know?

Right. And like, that's hard. It's really hard. That is really hard. That to see something so far down the horizon and to say, hey, we saved your butt on those rainy days. Yeah. I have so many Patreon questions.

Are you ready? Yeah, sure. Okay. 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 Fund's 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 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. Catherine asks, why are they so fucking cool? Molly Rep says, word for word, the question I was going to ask. Well, so yeah, clouds, why are they so cool? I mean, they just are, right? I mean, I couldn't put it better myself. Clouds are fucking cool. And that's like the great thing is like, you know, like no matter what, I can just look outside and

be like, that's just really cool. It's cool. It's like wallpaper for the sky. Right? You know what I mean? And it's different every day. All the time. Yeah, it's beautiful.

And sometimes it rains on us. Yeah. In a great way. Aki wants to know why are clouds white? Yeah, I 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 add in all of the different directions. And so that, that looks to our eyes like white, basically.

Kayla Simpson wants to know, how do hole punch clouds form? Oh, so, okay. So this is interesting. Okay. So I have never seen a hole punch cloud or a fall streak hole punch cloud or a cloud canal or a cavern or a sky punch. Call them what you want. But I looked it up and it's like there's just this big gaping bite taken from the middle of a cloud.

And if you had had moonshine for dinner, I can certainly see why you would think this was an alien spaceship, as many people have done. So what causes them? Between zero degrees C and negative 40 degrees C, all three phases of water can exist, right? You can have, you can have liquid, you can have vapor and you can have solid. If you, there's like this diagram that shows like where the dew point of water is. And then also there's like a similar one for ice, right?

Where at a certain temperature, then ice would form. But in those, in those in between regions, it's actually easier to form ice than it is to form liquid. So if you have both of them in the same place, then a lot of times the liquid will evaporate and the air, the water vapor will be more drawn towards the ice sort of. And so in a hole punch cloud, something happens that sort of disturbs the cloud. You get something that can, that can form ice like maybe a plane will go through and you'll get the right kind of particle that ice can form on.

And so then a little bit of ice will form and it'll sort of like, and a bunch of the water will sort of like go towards the ice. And then you won't be able to really see it because that part, there's not much of it there and it's pretty thin. And so you get almost this little, this little hole in the cloud. Oh my God, that's nuts. But I'm going to ask, how do you feel about the term cloud computing? You know, I don't have like strong opinions on it, but I do get a lot of followers on Twitter

from various like cloud computing resources and whatever. I guess those people would be technophologists. Do you think so? I don't know. Yeah, I think they'd be a technophologist. 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. Turns out the explanation is nephological in nature. So can you please explain and Jack Poirier and Courtney Ryan also have those questions about why is it cloudy in the winter? Yeah. So I mean, I'm from Pennsylvania originally. And so I know, I know the great skies of winter. It's a depressing time of year.

These are all effective disorder. Yeah. So a lot of it is, is just the kind of clouds that tend to form. So, you know, a lot of like the stratus clouds, like I said, form and the atmosphere is stable. And so you get sort of like these blankety, the stratus clouds. And in the winter, the 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. And so a lot of the stuff is just stratus-y overcasts or stuff. I'm from San Francisco and I just call that sunscreen. I, myself, a foggy day.

Soup weather. JKJK, 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. So many people, I'm going to say their names quickly, including Emily Maloney, Julie Barrett, Dave Insanity, Heather Densmore, Kitty Halverson, Chase Phoenix, Camille Young, Emmanuel Sanchez, and first time question askers,

Julia Tolbert, Belinda Kuo, and Libby Mail asked, essentially asked in Libby's words, what's the deal with seeding clouds? Yeah. So in order to form a cloud droplet, you need something for it to condense onto. Okay. Like I said, we usually call these things aerosols. They're like little like solid or liquid particles that come from different reactions in the atmosphere or sometimes it's dust or whatever.

Oh. So cloud seeding, they do it in some places do it sort of for research. There's a couple of places that do it sort of operationally trying to think. I think like somewhere in Canada, they do it. And I know like I think in Israel, they do it sometimes over the mountains. So basically if you put a bunch of particles into the cloud, these like little aerosols or whatever, I don't remember what they use for it, some sort of salt probably.

I was going to say fibrous, but okay. Yeah, some. Okay. They actually can use calcium chloride or dry ice or silver iodide or propane or even tiny particles of sodium chloride, aka table salt and bust those into the sky to change the weather. Like we went through a space time portal into the future, but actually cloud seeding and weather modification has been going on for like 50 years at least. And you're sort of changing the makeup of that cloud.

If there's not enough of those particles and you put some in the atmosphere, you're sort of triggering cloud formation. If you like want it to rain more there maybe or sometimes what happens is if you're sort of slowing down the rain process, then you can make it rain maybe further downstream. And Emmanuel Sanchez wanted to know what is that happening at the Beijing Olympics with their weather modification? That as far as I understand, that's what happened was that they did some sort of cloud seeding to try and rain out some of the pollution.

Yeah, I don't know the details on it though. Okay. So I looked this up and apparently China's all about cloud seeding and they shoot rockets of silver iodide into the sky and then sometimes hot gossip, it rains over another country and then everybody fights about whose rain it is. Like is it cedars keepers? I don't know. I'm not a cloud litigator.

Is that ethical to cloud seed as a cloud doctor? How do you feel about it? Yeah, I mean, it's not really harmful. You know, what you're putting in the atmosphere is just like I said, some sort of salt or whatever the kind of thing that's up there anyway. I mean, it's not something that can really be done to any sort of large, scary scale or anything like that. Like it's not easy to do and it's not easy to do well.

The places where it is done is like really sort of small scale places where they understand that environment really well. Julia Tolbert also, first time question asked her wants to know, do clouds have a smell? Do clouds have a smell? I've never noticed a smell. I mean, rain has a smell, right? Because you get that. It's called petrachor, the smell of rain, which is like really, I think it's like

something in the dirt that gets stirred up when it gets wet or something like that. Yeah, I hope clouds don't have a smell. It's mostly just water. Okay. A lot of people, of course, want to know about climate change. Emily Elaine Laborde, Nikkeia Wooten, who's a first time question asker, Hailey Everson, first time question asker, also Sarah Dez, and Jay Julie Bear, Shmini Thompson, and Janu.

They all want to know in Hailey'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 the short answer is yes, it will change things. As it gets warmer, it can shift climate patterns around. And so 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 stratocumulus 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, it's more about like small shifts. And the important thing there is like how that affects like the radiation because there's all these feedbacks with warming and how that affects the precipitation.

Those are the sort of more important questions for, you know, 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 like 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? Like, you know, if you live in a place that's like prone to flooding, you don't want more of that.

And 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. So we got to stock up on moisturizer in LA. Yeah, for sure. I know that this is probably a question you get a lot. It's a super stupid question, which is why I'm asking it. 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 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. That's a great way to get people to understand the difference. And you kind of address this, but like a round tree, first-time question asker, Mike, first-time question asker, and Bryce, and also Evan, want to know, is it true in Bryce's words that clouds often weigh millions of pounds? Yeah. A million sounds like a lot. I don't know.

I have to do the math, but definitely thousands. Like, a ton has definitely been thrown around. Okay. You know, those like random facts that you hear or something like that. Gracie Zesha wants to know, what is your favorite cloud formation and why? Okay. So my favorite clouds are Mammatus clouds. What?

Okay. So Mammatus clouds usually, they can form in other ways, but usually they form on the underside of anvils, right? So I said the anvil is this big cloud that comes out from a thunderstorm and Mammatus clouds happen like almost sort of opposite the way that that seamless clouds do where you get sort of little pockets of air that comes down. And so like it looks like really bumpy and it looks like this really cool formation. There's a trip down Mammary Lane.

Mammatus, the word, you know, I mean, the sort of, yeah, where the root of that comes from, right? Because you get this little like bulby, bulbousy things and they're just really, really cool looking and they're associated with storms, right? So you see them like after a storm passes and especially like if it's evening time, the light shines on them, they can look like really, really cool. They're my favorite. Yeah.

And they're boob clouds. Boob clouds. Nice. Aaron Ryan wants to know, what would it actually feel like to fall through a cloud? I mean, it would just feel like falling, but you'd be kind of moist. It'd be like, well, ouch, it would be like ouch. Elizabeth Gagnier wants to know, why do cumulonimbus 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 light is 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 sort of like more moisture in that cloud, right? Like if it rains, the clouds overhead are usually like 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 hail is like 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 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. Catherine Finney wants to know, I once heard from a meteorologist friend that it's possible

for clouds to have over 100% humidity. Is that true? How can that be true? It is actually. What? Yeah. So it's kind of funny. So because if you have like a blob of air, like when we think about clouds, we sort of like

hypothesize this parcel of air, which is, I don't know if you think about like a balloon without the balloon on it, sort of the blob of air. And it has a certain amount of water in it and it has a certain temperature. There's like this like sort of equilibrium that happens when you have like exactly the same amount of water, you know, at that two point temperature or whatever. But like nothing happens instantaneously. And so you can get like a couple of percent over 100% relative humidity. Whoa, that's nuts.

Okay, so that's not a lie. That's not from Flynn. This, by the way, is called supersaturation in case you ever meet a meteorologist and need to impress them in a pinch. Also, I may as well mention that skywriting involves smoking oil like paraffin to write words. And it's usually done around 3000 feet up. And to leave a sky message for your sweetie, it'll set you back around three grand. Now the fancier dot matrix font skywriting is actually called sky typing.

And that one lasts longer because it's about three times the altitude. But it's going to cost you like 15 Gs. So at one point, the most commonly written letters in the sky, I wanted to look this up. I was like, they must be marriage proposals, right? No. They said LS MFT. Ooh, what is the secret message? It just means lucky strike means fine tobacco.

Sky cancer. Somehow less sunny and romantic than I was expecting. Anna Thompson wants to know, what's up with sun showers? The event when it's raining, but it's sunny above you. What's up with that? Yeah, so I mean, again, things don't happen instantaneously, right? And so if you have like rain that forms from a cloud, it can be falling.

The cloud itself might dissipate in the time that it takes for that rain to fall on you. Or you could have, you know, just a little cloud that's sort of like moving quickly and you get some rain that falls. So yeah, it could happen. Just be bopping by. Eliza Gaston wants to know, how much truth is there in the saying, red sails at night, sailors to light, red sails in the morning, sailors be warned? You ever heard that?

It's, yeah, I've heard red skies at night. Sailors to light. Yeah, 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 Sears 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.

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 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 could start canceling your plants. We don't do rain. And a bunch of people, including first-time questioner, Grace Baden, ask about acid rain. Like, yo, can we talk about acid rain? Grace says, what is up with that and should we expect more occurrences of acid rain to continue as we continue to fuck up our atmosphere? Yeah. So I mean, like I said, water carries with it, the stuff that it was in it up in the sky.

And so if there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the sky or a lot of sulfate forms like sulfuric But yeah, whatever's in the atmosphere that can sort of form an acid will, yeah, it'll raise the acidity of the rain as it falls. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty gross and harmful. And yeah, if we keep sticking stuff up in the atmosphere, that's the thing that happens. So acid rain was on American mines more in the 1980s before the Clean Air Act of 1990. But that didn't totally curb sulfur dioxide emissions. And some countries, environmental regulations, haven't caught up since then.

So acid rain, just like acid wash genes, remains a global threat. Logan Kay wants to know, is a sun dog a type of cloud? No, a sun dog is okay. So there has to be a cloud for a sun dog to happen. But what happens is it's usually a cloud that you can't see. It's usually like a really thin ice cloud. And then if the sun is at a particular angle, then the scattering of the sun off of that ice cloud will make that really cool, bright spot.

Oh, I don't think I've ever seen a sun dog. Okay, so I Google image searched them and sun dogs are like ice halos that make these glittery, shiny spots on the horizon, kind of flanking the sun like a couple of Beyonce dancers. Now also, as long as I was looking up sun dogs, I was like, what about cloud cats? Boy, fricking howdy. There are a lot of cat shaped clouds on the internet. Some of them have questionable authenticity. There's a lot of heart shaped clouds too.

And some real deal dinosaur shaped clouds and dong shaped formations, according to a whole roundup of them in the British newspaper, The Sun. Sky dinos, sun dogs, cat clouds. As long as we're talking cats and dogs, side note, raining cats and dogs may have come from the Greek phrase, cattadoxa, which means beyond previous experience. A little trivia for you, speaking of which, Lauren Kebrawl 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 drop has to be certain, sort of a certain size before it's big enough, heavy enough to fall through there. Ballpark, like a rain drop is like, I don't know, a millimeter or something like that. Okay.

Fish. Woo. Also, after we stopped recording, Rachel mentioned that the rain drop emoji is on our shit list too, because rain drops flatten out when they're falling, and they make the shape of like a boob implant, or like a whoopee cushion, or I guess a lentil. So now we know that boob implants and whoopee cushions are lenticular. What a great, big, beautiful world we live in. John Morster said, I've seen clouds that have tornadoes in them and they have a greenish tint.

I live in Nebraska. Is that the hail? That's the hail, yeah. What the hail? Pandora 2 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 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 on the bottom. Megan Leonard, first-time question asker, wants to know can clouds carry parasites or harmful pathogens like Giardia? Can clouds get beaver fever is also another thing that Megan would like to know. I don't know. I don't know if that is. Okay. That sounds inappropriate.

I have no idea. I mean, I know that they can have bacteria. Like bacteria is something that can actually be like a cloud condensation nuclei if it's like the right shape or whatever. Really? So it could rain Giardia down on you, maybe. Maybe. I hope not.

I just Googled, can it rain Giardia? And I found out that there can be algae and fungus and bacteria, all kinds of things in clouds. And between that and the chem trail research, Google's probably pretty worried about me. Have you ever heard about those storms of like lizards and frogs that rain down? Yeah. It's fucking crazy. That'll turn out cloud green.

If you're like, lizard brain, dad, you're on the drugs. I swear I am not. Please listen to the thermophysiology episode if you have not. It's with the wonderful Dr. Shane Campbell-Staten for more on clouds of cold-blooded critters. Ethan Bader has a great question. Wants to know if different clouds had personalities, what would they be? Oh my gosh. Wow.

I mean, you know, stratus clouds would be sort of like gloomy, you know? Like emo. Yeah, or like I'm picturing like sadness on the inside out, you know? Okay. Sort of like, and then, and then yeah, cumulus clouds would be would be pretty happy, I think, right? Okay. They're just, they're pretty friendly.

They're just chill. And yeah, cumulinum is clouds would probably be like, they have like a short temper. Okay. Make the thunder. What would lenticular clouds be like? You're weird ant? Maybe. I feel like a pyro cumulus would be,

yeah, not someone I would want to mess with necessarily. Yeah, no, probably not. First timer, Polatar wants to know, why do clouds look like they're moving really fast sometimes? They are moving really fast sometimes. Really? How fast? Yeah. I mean, so like you tend to get like, you know, how there is a jet stream that jets like to fly in.

I mean, the air up there can move like, oh, trying to think like 50 knots or something like that. So it can just like zoom through. Yeah. And if you look up and there's clouds of different layers, it's cool. You can see that they're moving at different speeds. So you can just sort of track one and, and, and it's just floating right over you. Yeah. Just like upper body.

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 2.2 million pounds of diamonds annually. You have a crush on Saturn now, don't you? If you like it, you're going to have to put a ring on it rings. Okay. You know, what's funny about that is when I picture it raining diamonds,

I picture it like cut gemstones and not just rocks like I picture it too. There's an episode of Dr. Who I think where there's like something like that, some 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 think is the crappiest thing about clouds?

What do you hate or what do you hate about studying them? Or what is your least favorite cloud? What about clouds is on your show list? Wow. I don't know. I just love clouds. But yeah, I mean, being a scientist is frustrating sometimes. I mean, there's, you know, there are days when all you're doing is like

googling error messages for some code or, you know, like when you have to write papers or proposals or whatever, and you're like spending all this time writing, which is like one of those things that I never really enjoyed doing. And nobody really told me was such a huge part of the job until I was like, it was like too late to change my mind. So people picture you just on a grassy hill staring up at the sky with maybe like a casual notepad next to you. But really, you're like, you're at a computer.

Yeah, I'm at a computer constantly. Yeah, I mean, I use computer models to do my work. And yeah, so I, you know, make fake clouds on the computer. They're less pretty than the real ones. 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 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 need in the group that'll be like outside, like huddled on the side, like, oh my gosh, there's actual weather. I know. And the greatest thing about LA is that when it does rain here, it's like a holiday. Like people don't go to work.

Everyone cancels their plans. It's just like, well, it's raining. And I was like, oh, I know, I know, well, I'll be staying home, which is so thrilling. Any advice to anyone who wants to become a nephologist? So one of the biggest things in meteorology that I think maybe people don't know is how much math it is. Okay. So if you like want to study meteorology, you should probably bone up on your math skills.

It's a lot of like math and physics and stuff like that. Cool. Well, I would say that you're an array of sunshine, but you're really, I feel like that's an insult in your work. So you're just a very dense and deep, dark stormy cloud. And I mean that as a compliment. That's the best kind of cloud, right? It's I love them.

So as always, meet smart people and then invite them into your home if you feel like it to ask them stupid questions. And to follow DrStore, she's on Twitter at clouds in my beer. We're at oligies on Twitter. Come be friends with us on that. And on Instagram, we're at oligies. You can tag your merch photos, oligies merch. And we repost you on Mondays.

And thanks to Shannon Feltzis and Bonnie Dutch for handling that. They host the comedy podcast, You Are That. And you should take a listen. Thank you to Erin Talbert for admitting the oligies Facebook group. Thank you to Emily White and all of the oligies transcribers out there for making episodes accessible for free. Those and bleeped episodes for kids are up at alleyboard.com slash oligies extra. There's a link in the show notes.

And if you ever need a pro transcriptionist, email higheremilywhite at gmail.com. She is wonderful. Thank you, Jared Sleeper, for the assistant editing and some research help this week. And as always, the happy cumulus in the shape of a mustache. Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the kitty theme per cast and the dino theme to see Jurassic Wright podcasts for lead editing, could not do it without you. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme song. Now, if you listen to the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret.

And this week, okay, so once I had this big meeting, I was really nervous about it. And for fun, I had a time I was talking to a good friend who was like, let me draw you a tarot card from the deck sitting next to me. I'll see what advice I should give you. Kind of like in a let's see what your fortune cookie says. And the card was a sword. And I don't know dick about tarot, but she was like, oh, that kind of means like action and courage and power.

And I was like, that's tight. Those are good meeting vibes. So before the meeting, to remember to feel like strong and courageous, I straight up took a Sharpie and I drew a sword on my stomach. And it was fun going into a meeting knowing that I had a giant sloppy asymmetrical poorly drawn sword on my belly under my shirt and nobody else knew. But now you know. So go ahead, write crazy shit on your body before a meeting.

But don't do it before a date because if it goes well, that could be really weird. Unless you're seeing an X and you don't want to get back together. And then maybe you could write, hey, if you can read this, this was a mistake, which would probably kill the mood pretty quickly. So hot tip there. But yeah, it's your body. Graffiti it up for the day. Also, sometimes it's fun to write happy birthday on your butt

and then hang out with a friend all day and then moon them. And they're like, surprise, just make sure that the ink is non-toxic. Just your old dad looking out for you. Okay, bye bye. Nephrology, seriology, selenology. Right up in here, we'll make a happy little cloud. Use just the corner of the brush. You can just put as many layers of clouds in your world as you want.

But do one layer at a time.