RUFFLED CLOUDS, A NON EXPLANATION
If I were my neighbor, Don Collins, I could write a response to these clouds that I saw out of my back window this morning. Their shape seems odd to me, a kind of ruffled look that doesn’t look like a normal white puffy cloud. Don writes a weekly on-line Physics Photo of the Week post. He photographs some interesting natural event and then explains it in precise scientific words. Often I don’t understand the explanation. But a few weeks he explained a particular cloud formation and I learned why there are clouds at all. Clouds have always been clouds to me, fluffy white puffballs that floated across the sky, a purple layer that hid the sun, or when flying above the clouds a white foaming sea that hid the earth. But what I learned from Don in my 85th year, something that everyone else on earth must be aware of except me, is that clouds are warm humid air that rises until it hits cooler air when it then condenses into tiny droplets that form into clouds.
It is only the humid warm air rising and condensing that I now understand. I don’t know why the tiny droplets stick together in a cloud or how the sticking together droplets stay up there and don’t immediately drop back to earth in rain. Apparently I don’t understand why it rains either, do the droplets somehow get heavier when they get colder and drop from the sky?
So you can see that I am not the right person to explain why these clouds have the ruffled appearance that they do. Don is in Hawaii now. He just looked over the rim of Kilauea volcano and sent back a photograph. He will probably explain volcanos next week but I will ask him to also explain these ruffled clouds.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 