#2516 "Singleton Dry Cold Front Sunset"

The Singleton sunsets are almost always inspirational. 

A cold front had just swept across the lake. There was none of the much needed rainfall with this event. 

The bands of cirrus were all at different levels and thus oriented a bit different from each other according to the winds at each height. The embedded gravity waves were everywhere perpendicular to the southwesterly winds aloft.. The highest cirrus clouds were still catching the last bit of the direct beam of light from the sun. At lower elevations the refracted light was increasingly red as Rayleigh scattering removed the shorter wavelength blues from the beam. The sky was a study in meteorology and colour. I had just written about the shapes of those deformation zones which comprised the hard northern cloud edges in "Warming Winds and Deformation Zones". 

The blustery northwesterly surface winds had sculpted Langmuir streaks in the surface of the lake. The areas of the lake sheltered from the northwest winds were calm and better reflectors of the lighter hues of the sky. The waves and rippled surfaces were darker. The rough and choppy waves were not as good at reflecting and were more likely to reflected some of the dark and distant shores. The smooth seconds of each Langmuir streak reflected the lighter colours of the sky while the rough stripes were darker. 

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