#2579 "Behind the November Cold Front"

#2579 "Behind the November Cold Front" 11x14

Every sunset is a gift. The sky is different each time the sun sinks below the western horizon. 

The cold front had shifted to the south of Singleton. The clouds overhead were riding the wedge of Arctic air. Gravity waves in the bottoms of those clouds, revealed the wind direction. These gravity waves were perpendicular to the winds in the atmospheric frame of reference. Meanwhile, turbulent stratocumulus cloud streets were developing parallel to the northwesterly winds behind the cold front. Those long streets of cumulus are created by the same processes that Irving Langmuir used to describe windrows of seaweed in the Sargasso Sea back in 1927. The only difference was that this sunset was at the bottom of the atmospheric ocean of air. 

The winds at cloud level were definitely northwesterly while those at the ground were straight out of the west. Ekman turning of the wind as a result of surface friction is an important topic on almost the very first day of Meteorology 101. 

The porch light was on for my neighbour across the lake.  

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