[paul.fr]

A cumulonimbus cloud.

[dentstudent]

Pileus (cap) cloud, atop a cumulus cloud

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If it was at ground level, would it be Pileus Fog?

[Chemistry4me]

Hi,
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[paul.fr]

Like me, this cloud is just lovelly!

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(a heart with an arrow through it...)

[paul.fr]

and I thought this one looked just like the shadow vessel in Babylon 5

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[dentstudent]

or it could be a giant prawn...

[maimai]

The picture you all posted are various. One of them are landscape, I guess so because they are beautiful. Some are disaster, right? And one of these pictures look magical. This is just my feeling. How about you?

[elmejor]

some where in the Caribbean:


one of the most beautiful sunsets:

[RD]

SNAP !

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      http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~astro/research/sandiego.html


More pictures of green flashes

[elmejor]

thanx RD for giving the link to Andrew T. Young's Sunsets, thats really some study of sunsets this fellow has done. dont you think so?

[RD]

The green flash phenomenon only lasts a few seconds, (I've never seen it, I think few people have).

I should include the usual warning here that looking at the sun can permanently damage eyesight...

The brightness changes by a factor of two every minute near sunrise and sunset,
so an error of just a minute or two can make the difference between eye safety and eye injury.

http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/observing/advice.html

Looking at the sun on the monitor screen of a digital camera would be much safer: worse-case-scenario you need a new camera,
 (the camera CCD has an sun image permanently burned on to it). Unlike cameras eyes are not replaceable.

[Simulated]

I've taken over 140 pictures this winter so far.. Here's a few of my favorites

[beem]

Why are some people excited by the prospect of an arriving thunderstorm (despite the known and obvious risks of property damage)?

Yet some people say they feel nothing. 

I'm excited just looking at this:

[Karen W.]

Me too.. but The excitement is real excitement I enjoy the feeling in the air during a storm its presence and awesomeness is something that sends energy through your body.. everything feels alive!

[beem]

And everything's greener after a thunderstorm!  I suppose it's the rawness of its power that is so exhilarating []

[Karen W.]

Yes exactly! I feel like a little kid who wants to run outside and release lots of pent up energy when a storm comes....

Kids will do that when it storms they get to being a ball full of fire and really need to release a bit of steam to calm down.. It must do something to the human body and stir up all your molecules or something...

I love storms the louder the windier the better.. Then it becomes completely crazy.. not to afraid of storms I rather like them.. but am cautious about the lightening my cousin was struck a few times.. still living and she is fine.. but none of us no why!

[paul.fr]

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On August 18, 1996, several dozen big wildfires were each burning from 40,000 to over 100,000 acres in the West. In this GOES-8 visible satellite image, the smoke plumes from the northern California blazes stand out well. The Fork Fire plume, which extended east-northeastward over 400 miles across northern Nevada, originated from a 45,000 acre blaze near Upper Lake. Smoke from ten smaller fires, close to Stanislaus forest and Yosemite NP, congealed into the southeastern plume. Upper air maps showed 40-50 knot west-southwest flow along the track of the Fork Fire plume, and 20-40 knots with the Stanislaus/Yosemite plume. (Fire locations/sizes from Reuters)

[paul.fr]

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During the day on 19 Jun 1998, as on many late spring days, a sea breeze front moved inland from the Gulf coast across the Florida Panhandle and coastal bend. The cooler, relatively stable marine air behind the front was almost cloud-free, while thousands of small cumulus clouds prevailed along the front and farther inland. Sea breeze fronts often explode with thunderstorms, as vertical circulations along them lift hot and moist air upward through weak capping inversions. During this day, however, the air mass was too capped for thundertsorms along this part of the sea breeze front -- everywhere but over an intense forest fire in Suwannee County, Florida, near the town of Live Oak.

As the sea breeze front passed over the fire, the rising motion of the hot air off the fire combined with lift along the front; and a thunderstorm erupted. The smoke from that fire is a thin gray plume extending eastward from the thunderstorm in the image above. If your browser is configured for Javascript capability, you can see this process from space in this javascript loop of thunderstorm formation over the fire. [This loop will take several minutes to load on modem connections.]

Instead of aiding fire fighters with heavy rain, such storms can actually hamper fire suppression efforts by producing strong downdrafts, erratic winds, and additional lightning-started fires. In Florida, the ground and vegetation had been badly desiccated after months of scant rainfall, making conditions ideal for wildfires to start and spread.

Fires across FL during the spring of 1998 killed 3 people, destroyed at least 370 homes and vast tracts of field and forest, forcing the closure of much of I-95 and postponing the July 4 races at the Daytona speedway. Every county in the state had fires.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/coolimg/flfirecb/index.html

[paul.fr]

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Someone did not spray "silly string" all over the middlke of this satellite picture. Instead, the spaghetti-like cloud formations offshore from Washington and from Vancouver Island, BC, are cloud trails created in thin stratus by the exhaust of ships. These are loosely similar to ice-crystal clouds (contrails) generated by jet aircraft at high altitudes; except here they form clouds of water droplets. The machines producing them are much more slowly moving too, of course.

The day-long development and motion of these plumes is shown and described in more detail in this 4 MB image loop. You can track several ships by following the progress of the leading edges of their trails.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/coolimg/shiplume/index.html

[paul.fr]

A gallery of pictures depicting life on a Russian North Pole Drifting Station
http://nsidc.org/arcticmet/

During summer, melt ponds posed hazards to the camp. Here, a station member rows an inflatable raft in a melt pond that has formed in the middle of the camp at NP-6.

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Not all of the ice phenomena on the ice floes were naturally occurring. Station members sometimes made the most of their surroundings, witnessed in this polar bear made of snow.

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