Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #32: CLOUDS with Rachel Storer

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

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, what makes it rain, whether sailors delight at red skies at night, why clouds are never square and where we can find diamond rain. Follow Dr. Rachel Storer at Twitter.com/cloudsinmybeerA donation went to: WWF's Australian Wildlife and Nature Recovery FundFull-length (*not* G-rated) Nephology episode + tons of science linksMore kid-friendly Smologies episodes!Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaMade possible by work from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly R. Dwyer, Emily White, & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hey, it's that lady who's both a stranger and also your internet dad, Alli Ward, back with a light and a fluffy episode of Oligies. 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 safe for all ages. If you are looking for the full version of clouds, and you got some more time, and you're not around smaller gites, 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 possibleologies. 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, meteorology, nephology. 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 Nef 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 this 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, 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? 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 atter and nephologist? I didn't until you said that word. You're joking. But I was going to ask if people call you a nephrologist to laugh,

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 social media and stuff. I just think that sounds neat. A cloud of Dr. 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. Okay. So if you like look at a regular cloud, I think I'm going to probably get the numbers wrong, but it's literally can feel like a ton of water in a cloud. But the droplets are just so, so small 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 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 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 the cloud, the more the water is gonna 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 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's surroundings,

and it bubbles up. Like you would have bubbles in the boiling water, whatever you just, you could 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 gonna have storms, that 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 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, strato cumulus 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 this stratus cloud, and that cumulus isn't muffin? Yes, okay. Yeah, I'll take it. And then I guess maybe we'll just try to accumulate 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 pyrochemicals 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. 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, pyro cumulus or flammogenitis 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. 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 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 land-tickular clouds. And also, like, if you ever look at pictures of Mount Rainier and Washington, sometimes they'll form on top of the mountain, and you'll this like 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 skypan cakes or UFOs or like stacks of Hanukkah gelt. 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. 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, that's. And then, Annville Clouds are so literally, like,

the top of the troposphere is called the tropopause. And then above that, it's 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 they're called anvil 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 anvil. Oh my God. Okay, quick aside, I looked them up, and these thunderstorms do in fact look like anvil's.

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 animal. When this rising air hits the tropopause, that's the boundary between the lowest level of atmosphere and the next level stratosphere. The cloud hits that and it's like, oh, shoot, that's a ceiling. Okay, I'm just gonna casually fan out, I'm gonna act normal, hopefully nobody noticed.

It doesn't even know how cool it is. How does a cloud even form? You need the sort of basics that you need, our moisture and something for the moisture you can then 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 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. 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. So the higher the dew point, the more humid it is. 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. And so at that point, condensation can happen. Oh, OK. OK, 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? Like, 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? Right, 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 it's enough that you can see it. But if you look at it with like 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, right? It's not like there's weird hard boundaries. Right. So, you know, touching the ground versus not like, yeah, you know, give me a big over them. 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 cirrus.

What 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 serious, 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. Yeah.

I have so many Patreon questions. Are you ready? Yeah, sure. Okay. She's ready. But first, before your Patreon questions, each week, we make a donation to a cause of the ologist choosing. And this week, given the chat about pyro cumulus 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 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 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, wants to know why your cloud's 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. First time question, Oscar. 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 in Google that 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 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. And 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, soup 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, Schminny Thompson, and J.A. knew, 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, sort of 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 sort of shift where the main storm track regions happen. And then there's also over the oceans,

there's these large stratochumeless 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 like prone to flooding. You don't want more 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. Hoof. 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, 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? 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. Elizabeth Gagne wants to know, why do cumulo nimbus 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, cumuloninous cloud will tend to look greenish, and often that means that there's hail in it.

What? Because of just the hails that I 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 ting to it. Yeah. And then if you get clouds, like on the horizon, it all gets 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 sales at night,

sailors to light, red sales in the mourn, sailors to be warned. You ever heard that? 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 skaters 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 galoshas, which means if you live in LA, you can start canceling your plants. We don't do rain. Lauren Kippurall wants to know, how heavy does a cloud need to be before a 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, it has to be 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. 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 turbulence and air is always moving around and stuff

like that. Plus, there's all this 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.

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, 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, okay. You know what's funny about that is when I picture at raining diamonds, I picture it like cut gemstones and not just rocks. Like, I picture that too. There's an episode of Dr. Who I think where there's like something like that sort of diamond

planet. Like they're already cut and polished like a diamond mode. I picture the same thing. Yeah. And you're like, how? How? What do you love the most about clouds or your work or about being a nephologist, which you know 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 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 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 and 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 alleyware.com slash Smologies,

which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through and thank you Mercedes-Mateland of Madeland 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. Bye-bye. Okay, bye bye. Long days. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez.

Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez.

Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. Oh, geez. No, please.