#2452 "Sunset with Langmuir"

In the early days of my meteorological career I would have spotted this deck of cirrus and happily identified baroclinic zone cirrus (BZCI). Satellite imagery was just becoming available via hard copies on photographic paper - the fabled K560. Animation was achieved by cartoon flipping these hard copies. VHS filming of the hard copies was the next step to make animations of the low resolution imagery. Computer handling of the data was still a dream in the 1980's. This new data in the late 1970's was enough to make me a convert to remote sensing though. Weather was three dimensional and did not arrive as the intersections of circles on Venn Diagrams. 

Every line of cloud has a story to tell and I spent my career listening to what the skies had to say. Much of this research was published through COMET in Boulder, Colorado. Some other topics like langmuir streaks in the atmospheric fluid never made it to press even though I discussed the concepts many times. There is so much still to learn. 

This sunset sky was from 6:50 pm Thursday September 6th, 2018. I had to paint it for both the colours but also the meteorology. I had painted it before in #2203 "Langmuir Streak Sunset" but stumbled across the supporting imagery again and could not resist. I believe that the banding of the baroclinic zone cirrus results from the same process as Langmuir streaks in water. The tropopause provides the stable layer equivalent to the surface of the water. Distinct bands parallel to the strong winds in the fluid contained by the stable layer reveal the associated vertical motions therein. I like to think of elongated helical tubes stretched out along the direction of the strong winds which comprise the jet stream. The three-dimensional circulation in these helical tubes interact and the bands of cloud result. 

The atmosphere is another fluid and the physics of motion are universal. We just happen to live at the bottom of this ocean of air. 

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