Lecture 1: How to identify and name clouds (introduction to weather)

hey how you doing this is Mel strong and this lecture is on how to identify and name clouds now we're not going to talk about the processes that actually form the clouds that will be in a future lecture but here what we're doing is we're learning a naming system that was developed by Luke Howard a couple hundred years ago Luke Howard was a pharmacist and he just really liked clouds and he painted paintings of clouds and then in 1802 he published a classification system because up to that point there wasn't one and his classification system isn't perfect but it's still in use today and his cloud names are still in use today so that's what we're gonna learn and in his system you need to know two things to name a cloud you need to know the clouds shape and you need to know the clouds height above the ground now as far as shape goes all clouds in this system have to fall into one of three possible shapes cumuliform strata form of C reform and I'll show you examples of these shapes in in a minute and then for height we just have three categories of heights little middle and high and with those three shapes and those three Heights we come up with ten different cloud names in this system so first we're going to go through the shapes and cumuliform shape clouds are also known as heap clouds these are the clouds if it kind of puffy looking they might kind of look like cotton or cauliflower and they might be wider than they are tall they might be taller than they are wide they might be just a little tiny puff balls they may be low droopy clouds but all of these have something in common which is they all have this kind of puffy edge on them right so these are all Kimo form clouds now the stratiform clouds are a lot more boring and they're sometimes called the layered clouds they're like these big blankets to cover the sky and so you don't usually see a lot of features within these clouds maybe you can see the Sun poking through maybe not but just think of like a big solid gray sky and that's a stratiform cloud usually can't see the edges of these then xeroform are the clouds that are kind of wispy or curly or hairy sometimes they'll they'll have little hooks on the end sometimes not here's some that have little heads with whole feathery trails leading off of them these are pretty straight so there's a lot of varieties in in ceará form clouds now we've talked about the three shapes let's talk about the three heights and in order to understand these this little middle high terminology we have to explain a little bit how the atmosphere is structured and so let's imagine that we've got a mountain range here and we were let's say to launch a balloon up into the air above this mountain range and on the balloon we put a temperature sensor so it could tell us what the temperature is which is what a weather balloon actually does and so if we had a balloon and we let it launch and we collected all this data as it climbs up into the atmosphere and then we took all that data let's just say it's collecting temperature data and we made a plot right and in my plot I've got an x-axis of temperature so it's warmer to the right colder to the left and I plot height on the y-axis and I were to plot that data that that balloon measured my graph would look kind of like this at first the balloon would notice its warmest near the surface and as it goes up into the atmosphere cools and cools with height and that probably makes sense to you because if you go up to the top of a mountain it's usually colder up there we'll learn in a later lecture that when the sunlight passes through the atmosphere it really doesn't interact with it it warms the ground and the ground warms the atmosphere from the bottom but for now all we have to realize is that this this trend happens and then at some point something weird happens the our little weather balloon would notice that the air actually starts warming up as it gets when it gets to a certain point and continues to warm up as you go higher okay now in a later lecture we'll explain more about why this happens but for now all we're going to say is that this little inflection point between where the atmosphere cools with height and when it starts to warm with height that that forms a natural boundary between two layers in the atmosphere and all the air below that line is called the troposphere and all air above that line is called the stratosphere so the reason we're talking about this is this little middle/high business that refers to low middle high in this layer in the bottom layer of the atmosphere now the exact height of this varies by season they can vary by day if it's a really cold day it will be lower if it's a hot day it'll be higher if you're in the tropics it's higher if you're near that pulls it slower but kind of worldwide average is close to seven miles above the ground is where this division is so our low middle high clouds have to fall somewhere between close to the ground level and up to as high as maybe seven miles so roughly we just divide that like this low clouds middle calls high clouds now there's a problem with this and that we don't have a word for a cloud that's in here or a cloud that's in here so we kind of have to force clouds to fall into one of these three categories so like I said it's not it's not necessarily a perfect system so the high and mid clouds have a prefix so if a cloud is up here we give it a prefix 0 and if a cloud is kind of around here we give it a prefix Alto if the cloud is down here it does not have a prefix this will make more sense when I give you some examples ok so let's start with one I have a quinoa form cloud and it's low I call it cumulus all right now I take that puffy cloud and I move it up to kind of the middle of the troposphere I would call that Alto cumulus either looks smaller and I'll show you pictures of these in a second but that also tells you the mid level of the atmosphere or the troposphere if I move that puffy cloud up higher you know again peer up here even smaller and it'll have that prefix 0 you can do the same thing with Stratus cones it works a little bit differently so here's a high Stratus cloud a blanket that would be cirrostratus with also Stratus usually what that means is that that high cloud extends all the way down to the middle of the atmosphere at middle of the troposphere that's altostratus and if it extends down almost to the ground doesn't have to touch it but gets low we'll call that Stratus so again there's no prefix here so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through some pictures of some of these clouds and we're gonna learn the cloud names that we're going to learn how to identify them so first we're gonna start with chemo and chemo s are probably the most commonly known cloud these are the clouds that you see on a summer day a lot of times here in New Mexico and if you watch this for a while you'll see the clouds will grow and they'll die and they kind of drift around but they're not getting too terribly large now these are considered low clouds and this is one of the things you kind of have to get used to is recognizing what we call a little cloud and what we call middle cloud and the high cloud so everything I'm showing you here are low clouds if you ever lay in your back and you're looking up at shapes changing in the clouds you're probably looking at cumulus clouds sometimes especially here in New Mexico in the summer they'll have flat bottoms that's not always the case but that's a common feature that they have so depending on when you look they may have different proportions so right here that one's wider than it is tall but as I sit here and watch this grow now it's the same height as it is wide and then as I wait I can see now it's getting taller than it is wide and later in a later lecture we will talk all about though what's happening here and like why this is why this cloud is growing but the point is the proportions can be totally different just depending on when you're looking so you know this cloud is clearly getting pretty tall it started out you know lighter than it was tall but it's changing that as the day progresses so here's some for example that just about as tall as they are wide notice that these are also have mostly flat bottoms here here's one that's taller than it is wide so here's a typical summer day in New Mexico we've got a bunch of little cumulus clouds here and if you watch them for a while you'll see one being born and then you watch it and pretty soon it will die and dissipate and they just continue to be born live for a while and die as the day continues so these are all cumulus most importantly when the opening credits of The Simpsons occurs the clouds that they show are cumulus clouds and in fact in the city where they live cumulus clouds are the only cause they ever have that show so now let's move up to Alto cumulus clouds so now these are going to be higher above the ground so naturally they're going to appear smaller because they're farther away from us but the clouds themselves are actually also smaller and here's some typical Alto cumulus so these are considered mid cloud so and so now these are not low and these are considerably further up in the atmosphere you can see how they're smaller and often they will kind of form a patchwork pattern cumulus clouds are more kind of randomly spaced altocumulus often form these patterns kind of like what we're seeing here like a patchwork again sometimes they'll be touching each other sometimes they won't be touching each other another example so everything we're seeing here is a mid-level cloud and so nothing here is considered low levels again this is what takes some practice to get used to here they're all touching and these clouds are a little bit lower than the previous slides but these are still considered altocumulus clouds and here you can't even see the sky so that's that is a possibility that they could form a continuous blanket of cloud okay so that's altocumulus they don't necessarily have to be independent little puff balls a lot of times they'll align themselves in rows and we call this Anjali artists but all you need to know here is that these actually aligned rows of altocumulus clouds so still puffy clouds still mid-level in the troposphere alright let's go on to cirrocumulus and because they're so high up these are little tiny puffy clouds that you can actually kind of see through right like white was shining through cirrocumulus clouds because they're so thin and you know they're tiny because they're far away but they're also literally very thin clouds and zero cumulus clouds often form patterns in a similar way that the altocumulus form patterns so sometimes they'll be this patchwork a lot of times they'll often also form in these rows kind of like this and this so again that's that undulated texture that with that die I alluded to earlier so these are again upper part of the atmosphere so here's something rose you can see they're a little bit okay so cirrocumulus now this brings up an issue which is how can you tell the difference between cirrocumulus and altocumulus because they're both puffy and they're both kind of small and though these super tiny little dots right so if you saw super tiny little dots you're pretty easily in cirrocumulus but if you have bigger ones how can you tell them apart they might kind of be the same size and so one way to think about this is think about it like you're a painter and you're gonna paint these two images of clouds so notice the one on the left this is our altocumulus it has more shading it's more 3-dimensional the cirrocumulus is more 2-dimensional and appearance they're so high up there that you can hardly see any shading now this doesn't work 100% of the time especially if it's sunrise sunset and you have a low Sun angle a lot of times you'll get shading even on cirrocumulus but if you're one of my students and you're you have to identify which one of these clouds you have go with the shading if you see shading you no it's altocumulus if I give you one that does not have shading and just looks two-dimensional go with cirrocumulus so there's a fourth puffy cloud that actually does not exist at just one of these three levels but in fact can exist at all of those three levels at the same time it starts out low and it grows up high and that's called the cumulonimbus now a cumulonimbus also has another more popular name which is thunderstorm because this Nimbus means precipitation so anytime you have a puffy cloud that is precipitating whether it be rain or snow you go with cumulant Nimbus even if it's not making any audible thunder or you can see any visible lightning just the fact that you have precipitation out of the cumuliform cloud we're going with Kindle and Nimbus so here's an example of what is first a cumulus cloud right now but then notice right there we're starting to get some precipitation and in the later lecture we'll explain why this is happening but for now just realize that achelous can sometimes turn into a cumulant cumulonimbus if the conditions are right so once you see precipitation you have to go with a cumulonimbus now here's a classic cumulonimbus and you can see that at the top of this you are getting kind of there's a kind of fuzzy appearance on the top of this cloud and that's called the anvil and the anvil is made of ice and in fact you'll notice that this part of the cloud has a very sharp boundary between the puffy part and in the air and this part is very fuzzy this is how you can tell the difference between ice and liquids so you can have clouds that are have little microscopic liquid droplets and you can have clouds that have a little microscopic particles of ice and the difference is that the ice will look fuzzy and the boundary of a liquid cloud will be very sharp and distinct so here we've got one forming over the Sandia's that's the anvil and that's all ice now we can't really see here whether it's raining down there but if you see the anvil you're pretty much guaranteed that it's raining or or perhaps even snowing so when you see the anvil think cumulonimbus because there's no other cloud that forms that kind of structure so here's some anvils forming in the distance so what this is so far away we can't tell if there's rain or not but when I see that that in and that animal is growing there and this is this one's starting to form one and it will grow these cumulonimbus start out without an anvil but as time goes on the anvil will grow and as the storm becomes more mature but if you walk out in the distance and you see that anvil you know they're having a thunderstorm and then you know this precipitation so anvils are always going to be cumulonimbus in this class for sure if you can actually see precipitation you also know you've got cumulonimbus so here we've got a thunderstorm over the Sandia's you can clearly see the beginning in the end of where the rain is falling if you can see definite boundaries with the rain you've got cumulonimbus so in this example we can't see the anvil we can't see the top of the cloud you can see some flashes of lightning there but normally you especially like a New Mexico summer you'll you this is kind of a typical cumulonimbus you can see the puffy cloud above you can see a shaft of rain below you know you've got cumulonimbus but if you can't see this up here and all you get to see is this down here if you can see a boundary where the rain ends somewhere you've got cumulonimbus okay so here's a classic example cumulonimbus over albuquerque that rain coming down even though I can't see anything above here I don't know if it's got an anvil or anything the fact that I can see that the the beginning and the end this rain column tells me it's cumulonimbus now in the winter sometimes we can get cumulonimbus and because it's so cold the entire cloud is made of ice crystals and you can see that it's fuzzy up here but it's even fuzzy down there and this is a cumulonimbus that's snowing okay so if you see that it still has this anvil shape it's snowing all the way down to the ground there's another type of puffy cloud that's kind of a special case it's called stratocumulus so if I have one low puffy cloud I've got cumulus if I have two low puffy clouds I always still call them cumulus but if I have so many puffy clouds that they end up touching each other or almost touching each other and maybe I can see a little light in between I don't go with stratocumulus stratocumulus is actually the most common cloud type on earth but we don't see it that much on land because stratocumulus occurs over the ocean and we get it once in a while here in New Mexico so here's some some strategy memo so if I could just pull out one of those blobs I'd have one single low cumulus cloud but I have so many of them that you know I can see some light in between and maybe I'll get a glimpse of the sky or maybe not I'm gonna call this stratocumulus so classic stratocumulus they look very you know they're very low they look very heavy very bulbous on the bottom usually typically worldwide you don't see so much flat bottoms on the strategy models like you do on on your cumulus clouds kind of they over time they just kind of have those they roll and very slowly changes their shapes but again you can see the breaks in between can't really see the sky here so that's strata cumulus I took this from a plane looking down this is what strategy most looks like from above and if you were to fly over the oceans sometimes you will see this for just thousands of miles and in this is just like I said this is the most common cloud type on earth the stratocumulus it tends to form over the oceans now it might be confused with this one this is when we just saw this is the altocumulus and the altocumulus kind of looks like the strategy Mullis but these are higher up in the atmosphere and the stratocumulus are low only so keep in mind this is a mid cloud whereas this is a low-cost so you can see it brush in the top of the Sandia's there kind of in the in the distance there so that's kind of how you can tell these two things apart is it if it's low in there it's just solid puffy clouds stratocumulus if it's mid-level altocumulus so we've gone through all the cumuliform clouds and now we're going to go through the stratiform clouds which are a lot less interesting to look at we're going to start with Stratus which is a low stratiform cloud and the key to identifying Stratus is that you cannot tell where the Sun is so it's a gray sky and in this time-lapse the Sun is actually right there but you can't see it so if you've got a gray sky and you can't point to the Sun then you've got Stratus okay so might be light gray might be dark gray there might be some texture in the sky there might not be but what's consistent is that you can't tell where the Sun is now if that gray sky is also producing precipitation either rain or snow we're going to call it nimbostratus there's only two types of clouds that produce precipitation cumulonimbus which is the puffy one in nimbostratus Stratus which is the layered one and nimbostratus you know grey sky as far as the eye can see producing precipitation as far as the eye can see right so with cumulonimbus you could tell that or the boundaries of the precipitation were or at least one of the boundaries with nimbostratus you can't tell where the storm ends because it just from your perspective looks like it's going on forever in all directions okay and again it can be rain or can be snow that's pneumo Stratus okay now if our cloud deck is thinner and we get up to the middle part of the atmosphere we call that altostratus and because it's thinner cloud the Sun will kind of poke through except it will be a fuzzy ball so here is some altostratus and you can see we can point to where the Sun is but it's a fuzzy ball right so that's your key for Altos Stratus gray sky but you can identify where the Sun is in each case all right so altostratus so when we get to the top of the troposphere we have a very thin layer of cloud that we call cirrostratus and not only is this cloud very thin but because it's so high up it's actually very cold and it's entirely made of ice crystals and it turns out that when light shines through a layer of ice crystals it makes an optical pattern it makes a circle and cirrostratus clouds are characterized by this ring that goes around the Sun now the pictures I'm showing you here are not mine I have a really hard time getting good pictures of cirrostratus clouds and some of these I've been able to track down the source some of these are just there all over the internet and I can't figure out where they originated from so I can't give everybody credit but key is that in a cirrostratus cloud you might see the Sun as a fuzzy ball but the key is look for this ring and that ring will sometimes have little rainbow colors in it so for this is probably the best one I have we can kind of see some color in there not only do you get a ring around the Sun but you can get a ring around the moon and this guy shows you how thin this cloud is like you can see stars through it right so it it's even harder to call it a cloud but we do it's just this very thin layer of ice crystals away at the top of the tropopause okay so cirrostratus you're looking for the ring okay so we've gone through cumuliform we've gone through stratiform now we're to see reform and with sea reform clouds there's actually only one type there are no low clouds there are no middle clouds or only high cloud versions of sea reform and so those are called Cirrus and because they're so high up in the sky they are entirely ice and they have kind of there's a wide variety of textures for cirrus clouds typically they're very you know kind of wispy hairy feathery looking so these kind of look cobwebs sometimes they cross each other they look like they're kind of tangled up like these here are some that look more feathery and these kind of have a net-like appearance sometimes they'll get so dense that it will appear solid gray and some people might try to call this cirrostratus but if you're one of my students if you can see the edge something like this still go with with Cirrus a lot of times they'll be hooked so you see some of these have little hooks on them and occasionally they'll be just perfectly straight so here are some perfectly linear cirrus clouds here are some of those hooks here are some that have this generating head with a little tail on it okay here's something that crisscross each other so there's there's all kinds of shapes of cirrus clouds but they're pretty easy to identify they don't look like anything else that we've seen here so those are the ten cloud types as originally outlined by Luke Howard back in 1802 and most of the clouds you will ever see will fit in one of those categories but there are a few odd balls that don't completely fit and I'm gonna give you two more and these two you actually will see in New Mexico occasionally so for the first one here we've got the Sandia's and there is wind that's blowing up over the Sandia's and for reasons that will explain in a later lecture when air rises it it can form clouds so there's this little cap of a cloud that sits on the mountain okay now that cap is now grown and it's starting to get this shape that's kind of a disc-shaped and we call these clouds lenticular clouds or if i zoom out a little bit more okay so this whole thing now is this air mass moving over the mountain is creating this this disc called the lenticular cloud but sometimes the air when it moves over the mountain the cloud isn't actually touching the mountain so for example here we've got air moving over the mountain and it's creating lenticular clouds that are hovering above the mountain but it's is still the same process here are some more okay so these are all lenticular clouds these disc shapes and there's air moving over the mountain here sometimes they occur in stacks so these are low clouds those are cumulus down there lenticular can be usually there low to mid clouds these are you know fairly low but they're higher than the cumulus in this one and often you will see chains of lenticular clouds so you so sometimes they'll get isolated little disks and sometimes you get a whole bunch of them coming all together and you can see in this how there's air moving in and out of these lenticular clouds so there's a big kind of wave here in the atmosphere that's causing this and the wave is very slowly moving from left to right in this time-lapse here's something similar so we've got a we've got a wave in the atmosphere and these lenticular clouds are writing the top of that wave and the wave is very slowly moving from left to right so one thing that can happen with lenticular clouds is let's say we've got a mountain range and we've got wind coming out of the in this case let's say this is the Sandia's and and when we'd be coming out of the west and air is going to be forced up the mountain now we'll learn in a later lecture that if you take air and you push it up eventually it will reach its dew point in form of cloud and so that's going to happen here and we're going to get this little lenticular cloud that forms on the top of the mountain okay now the air goes down the other side of the mountain but the thing is air is compressible and it's bouncy su v--'s if you compress air it kind of bounces back so what happens is as the air comes down the mountain it'll actually bounce in the atmosphere and you know you can't see this but there will be these big waves that form in the atmosphere and at the top of each wave if the wave goes high enough it will make another ticular cloud so often you don't just get one you often get it a whole chain of meticulous so that's what's happening here this is Mount Shasta there's a lenticular hat kind of on the top and we also see some lenticular clouds nearby and that's they're all related that we're making waves in the atmosphere from that mountain interacting with the wind so here a whole chain and one took your clouds again I've gotten images here that I can't track down in terms of the original source but they're very popular on the Internet so that's what you're going to see here on some of these but here's a whole chain of them so the atmosphere is again kind of bouncing and as it bounces it makes lenticular clouds at the top of each of those waves sometimes it will occur in stacks okay that's that can happen in fact here's a image from National Geographic this is I believe is Mount Rainier and these are you know big stack and lenticular clouds on top here's one I took over campus you don't have to have a mountain to get lenticular clouds conditions are right you can get one tubular clouds just about anywhere but they the mountains definitely help their formation would it surprise you if I told you that every year there are a alarming number of 911 made because people we are reporting UFOs when they see clouds like this maybe that doesn't shock you but you know that's kind of convincing right or how about that one I mean that's the mothership showing up for sure so some of them really do look like UFOs and here's another one from National Geographic and they took this picture right before the zebra got abducted here okay so that's when ticular clouds that's an extra one another extra one here's a cumulonimbus so that remember that's the thunderstorm and sometimes what we'll get right on the bottom of a nimbus are these sinking blobs a cold-air that come down and they form kind of a droopy looking cloud that's called the mattes and these will often happen right before or right after a thunderstorm occurs so here they are each one of those blobs is sinking cold air that's coming down out of this cumulonimbus here's some more that are these are better lit here so you can see them starting to come down we got a little precipitation over here but for the most part that's those are just blobs of cold air here's some good ones forming right there okay so these are Alma mattes these blobs coming down so again sometimes you'll see this right before a thunderstorm or sometimes you'll see it right after a thunderstorm so we do see these in New Mexico in the summer now here's a there's a thunderstorm in the distance and this is the anvil that's kind of drifting over us and sometimes they'll form in the anvil itself so you can see some little blogs in there and sometimes you'll see really spectacular photos of madness in New Mexico the best time to see mammatus is late in the afternoon and when the Sun angle is low they'll show up better kind of like this one or this one these are momentous forming in an anvil so this whole thing up here is the anvil and another one again near sunset and it really exaggerated s-- the the Matis makes it easier to see a lot of times the madness that we get here in New Mexico or not nearly as good as these pictures I'm showing so this is probably the best Momentis that I've taken a picture of here in Albuquerque but this is kind of more tick typical so this is on campus and you can see that there's blobs in there right but it doesn't look nearly as well-defined as some of those other pictures okay so in conclusion we got 10 cloud types that were originally defined by Luke Howard back in 1802 and on top of that I'm giving you two others that don't fit very well in that original classification system lenticular and madness okay so in the next lecture we're going to start getting into humidity and we're going to work up to how these clouds actually form thanks for watching you

Channel: Mel Strong

Views: 82,984

Keywords: time lapse, cloud formation, clouds, weather, Mel Strong, new mexico, cumulus, cumulonimbus, altocumulus, cirrocumulus, stratus, altostratus, cirrostratus, stratocumulus, cloud names, cloud classification, cloud types, introduction to weather, weather 101, home school, self study, home study, types of clouds, weather lecture

Id: pOwPs4kNSwc

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018