Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

The MAIL calls this a shelf cloud.

IT’s NOT.

It’s a Cumulonimbus capillatus.

Note to the MAIL: You have one of the World’s top experts on clouds. Pick up a copy of the CLOUD BOOK by Richard Hamblyn. It’s published by the MET OFFICE.

Oh, and here is a shelf cloud:

A real shelf cloud- courtesy of Tom Skilling, WGN Chicago (One of Americas greatest on air Meteorologists ever.)

All you had to do was ask somebody who knew something about clouds…

The soap box is now free….

Image from NASA Modis Satellite 2 pm UK time. The thinning ash cloud is being absorbeb by a low pressure SE of Iceland.

Great news for air travelers this evening. The eruption in Iceland is now putting out much less ash and the cloud is much lower. The low level ash is not headed toward the UK as the image above shows.

The snow-cap that covered the volcano has melted away. This has reduced the steam/ash combination that was climbing to over 3,000 meters.

Even more good news tonight. The upper level and lower level winds will push any new ash cloud to the North of the UK and France. It looks likely that airports will be opening across Western Europe tomorrow and this is now being confirmed by the BBC.

We continue to get pics and video from viewers after yesterday’s tornado here in the Huntspatch (Huntsville AL).

Viewer Lauryn Draper shot some great video fo it and put it up on YouTube. The video was shot a few blocks from our studios. The tornado WAS on the ground through most of this video I suspect. Tornadoes are wind and not cloud, so just because you could not see the funnel in contact with the ground does not mean it wasn’t.  It began doing damage near the end of this video.

Viewer Cristie Clark sent me the video below from a different angle. You can hear the Tornado Sirens sounding across the city clearly.

and here it is:

Nasa has released an interesting image of Earth. It’s a composite of hundreds of images of the Earths clouds. No borders have been added. Just clouds. Where there are clouds most of the time you see gray.

Image from NASA Modis sensor on the TERRA Satellite, of cloud cover averaged over October 2009. Click for the full size image (Large)

In places where the satellite saw clouds some of the time, but not often, you get a blue gray and areas where the satellite saw almost no cloud in any of the satellite passes, you get a dark blue.

Say you want to live in a place where there is almost always sunshine. Look at the image, move to a dark blue spot. Like a mix of rain and sun, gray blue will do you! What is most interesting here is that the difference in cloud cover, between land and sea, allows the continents to show up quite well in many areas!

Note also that there is little cloud cover over Greenland or the Antarctic. These spots have the Earth’s only remaining ice sheets. The cold air above the ice means the air can hold little moisture. The Antarctic especially, is a great white desert.

A desert I long to visit.

The band of constant cloud cover near the Equator is the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).