Category Archives: Weather, Climate and Science

This was actually shot a couple of weeks ago also, before the big fogs this week. Mornings like these are why I like to be the one who takes the dog out at dawn.

This is actually a shot from a couple of weeks ago. October 3rd, to be exact. There were some really nice wave clouds at sunset tonight also, but I’ve got a backlog that I want to put out on the web. There’s a few more of this sunset in the gallery. Enjoy!

Thought I would write just a little bit about the cool foggy mornings we’ve been having along the Northern Front range this week. Dylan has a particularly awesome picture of our morning pea soup up on Flickr right now.

I’ve actually heard a lot of theories to explain this lately, but I think what happened was a mixture of local and large-scale weather. Locally, we had a pretty intense rain event, that left the ground very wet (saturated, almost).

Evaporating moisture from the surface condenses in the cool dry air that moved in behind the frontal system that brought the rain. Makes sense. Check out the temperatures (red line) and dew points (blue line) the last couple of days:

On the large-scale though, the storm system has moved off to the east, and has been sending little bits of cloudiness our way. The satellite makes this fog look like part of the cloud system just getting trapped in our little bit of local valley.

When you sit at near 1,000ft above the storm to your east, it’s easy to get outflow from big storms at ground level. And pretty cool! I’ve enjoyed watching the fog flow in and lift out so much lately, that I made a little movie from the web cam that sits on top of my building. Enjoy!

There’s some nice shots from the day in the gallery.

With Mark’s parents visiting for the weekend, we decided to show them some of the sites. The Poudre Canyon is a local spot of beauty, and the overcast skies provided a perfect opportunity for long exposure shots of the river. The fall colors were beautiful, the river was low, and the wind whistled through the dry leaves leaving the quiet ominous feeling of an incoming storm.

The first full moon after the autumnal equninox is traditionally the Harvest Moon. This especially means a lot to us this year as all of our local food sources (the CSA, Deb’s Farm, and my garden) are all producing bountiful amounts of food! I wish I had more time for preserving. Plus, our freshly processed cow arrived home yesterday!

Well, I am just full of photos this week, aren’t I? Here’s a shot of the sunrise from yesterday morning. The puffy clouds were remnants of the heavy storms that blew through the night before, and the morning was cool and quiet. A portent of the coming fall and the lateness of the season.

Last night we had a few nice supercells pass through north east of town. The lightening was constant, and beautiful. Quite a bit of hail was reported from these storms, most marble-to-quarter sized. The local storm reports also mention heavy rain and wind damage.

I spent about a half hour standing outside in a quiet neighborhood street at around 10:30p last night, trying to get a nice shot of these storms. They all looked awesome on my little LCD, but when I got home I was severely disappointed in the lack of detail. Where I saw dramatically silhouetted billowing clouds with crackling lightening flashing between them, all that came through in the photos is a vague blue glow and a few dim bolts. I think the light pollution from the bright sodium street lights in my chosen location was just a bit too much, plus it seems that I probably left the shutter open too long, and what was a bright bolt on a dark cloud, over time, is saturated out into less and less detail.

Oh well, I’m sure I’ll get more chances as the fall storm season rolls around. For the fun of it, I added a gallery for Sky Shots on this site, and I’ll update it with new shots from dog walks and random afternoon clouds.

One of Kate’s mailing lists at school informed us of the following…
“Just as before, the Space Shuttle has un-docked from the International Space Station and the two of them are flying in formation about 200 miles above the Earth. They are traveling around 17,000(ish) MPH and can be seen in the night sky at …”

We saw it plain as day.
There was a bright spot chased by another less bright spot which shows on the long exposure as streaks. I told Kate “If you use your imagination, it really is a space station getting chased by a space shuttle” to which she replied, “But it really is!”. Sure, but I still contend you have to use your imagination. When I look up into the sky, I am never imagine that there are people in those white dots… That’s just crazy!

And did I mention the mosquitos? If you go outside for only 10 minutes after dark, it is still worthwhile to put on a t-shirt. I’m thinking this could be my year for West Nile virus. I’m hoping for the “feel tired for a couple days” type of West Nile . Not the “brain swells and then you die” kind. It’s still quite rare… the CDC has Colorado up to 72 cases , only bested by California (more detail here ).