Fri., Oct. 30, 2009
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Keep an eye out for typos, the Friday afternoon notes are often put together in a hurry.

Today's music was Hibernian Rhapsody and was played by a group named De Dannan.  It's a Celtic version of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody .

This is a logical time to learn a little bit about the 2 most common types of satellite photographs.  You'll find this discussed on pps 99-100 in the photocopied ClassNotes.  Throw those old notes away, the figures below are better and were on a handout distributed in class.  You'll find some questions (in red) embedded in the notes.  These formed part of an in-class optional assignment.  You won't earn any extra credit if you did the assignment, but you could earn a green card.


When you see satellite photographs of clouds on the TV weather you are probably seeing an infrared satellite photograph.

Question #1 - Name the low altitude layer cloud and the high altitude layer cloud in the figure above.
Question #2 - On an IR satellite photograph, the ground will often change from dark grey or black to light gray during the day.  The ocean nearby won't change at all.  Why does the ground change color but not the ocean?

1. An infrared satellite photograph detects the 10 um IR radiation actually emitted by the ground, the ocean and by clouds.  You don't depend on seeing reflected sunlight, so  clouds can be photographed during the day and at night.  You may recall that 10 um radiation is in the middle of the atmospheric window, so this radiation is able to pass through air without being absorbed.  If clouds don't get in the way, you can see the ground on an IR photograph.

2.   Clouds absorb 10 um radiation and then reemit IR radiation.  The top surface of a low altitude cloud will be relatively warm.  Warmer objects emit IR radiation at a greater rate or at higher intensity (the Stefan Boltzmann law).  This is shown as grey on an IR satellite photograph.  A grey unimpressive looking cloud on an IR satellite photograph may actually be a thick nimbostratus cloud that is producing a lot of rain or snow.

3.   Cloud tops found at high altitude are cold and emit IR radiation at a lower rate or lower intensity.  This shows up white on an IR photograph. 

4.   Two very different clouds (a thunderstorm and a cirrostratus cloud) would both appear white on the satellite photograph and would be difficult to distinquish.  Meteorologists are interested in locating tall thunderstorms because they can produce severe weather.

5.   The ground changes temperature during the course of the day.  On an infrared satellite animation you can watch the ground change from dark grey or black (afternoon when the ground is warmest) to lighter grey (early morning when the ground is cold) during the course of a day.  Because of water's high specific heat, the ocean right alongside doesn't change temperature much during the day and remains grey throughout the day.  Here's a link to an IR satellite photograph loop on the UA Atmospheric Sciences Dept. webpage.
A visible satellite photograph photographs sunlight that is reflected by clouds.  You won't see much on a visible satellite photograph at night.  Thick clouds are good reflectors and appear white.  Thinner clouds don't reflect as much light and appear grey.  The low altitude layer cloud and the thunderstorm would both appear white on this photograph and would be difficult to distinquish.
Question #3 - Why are high-altitude clouds thin?

Here's a summary of what we have learned so far.  The figure above wasn't shown in class.

The figure below shows how if you combine both visible and IR photographs you can begin to distinquish between different types of clouds.



The last big topic we will cover before next week's quiz is precipitation formation and types of precipitation.  Only two of the 10 main cloud types (Question #4 (I think) - What 2 cloud types are they?) are able to produce significant amounts of precipitation.

This figure shows typical sizes of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), cloud droplets, and raindrops (a human hair is about 50 um thick for comparison).  As we saw in the cloud in a bottle demonstration it is relatively easy to make cloud droplets.  You cool moist air to the dew point and raise the RH to 100%.  Water vapor condenses pretty much instantaneously onto a cloud condensation nucleus to form a cloud droplet.  It would take much longer (a day or more) for condensation to turn a cloud droplet into a raindrop.  You know from personal experience that once a cloud forms you don't have to wait that long for precipitation to begin to fall.

Part of the problem is that it takes quite a few 20 um diameter cloud droplets to make one 2000 um diameter raindrop.  How many exactly?  Before answering that question we will look at a cube (rather than a sphere).


It would take 64 individual sugar cubes to make a 4 cube x 4 cube x 4 cube cube.  That is because the bigger cube is 4 times wider, 4 times deeper, and 4 times taller.  Volume is 3 dimensions.


The raindrop is 100 times wider, 100 times deeper, and 100 times taller than the cloud droplet.  The raindrop has a volume that is 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000 (one million) times larger than the volume of the cloud droplets.

Question #5 - How many 20 um diameter cloud droplets would you need to make 1 200 um diameter drop of drizzle?

Fortunately there are two processes capable of quickly turning small cloud droplets into much larger precipitation particles in a cloud.


The collision coalescence process works in clouds that are composed of water droplets only.  Clouds like this are only found in the tropics.  We'll see that this is a pretty easy process to understand.  This process will only produce rain, drizzle, and something called virga.

The ice crystal process produces precipitation everywhere else.  This is the process that makes rain in Tucson, even on the hottest day in the summer (summer thunderstorm clouds are tall and reach into cold parts of the atmosphere, well below freezing.  Hail or something resembling hail called graupel often falls from these storms; proof that the precipitation started out as an ice particle).  There is one part of this process that is a little harder to understand.  This process can produce a variety of different kinds of precipitation particles (rain, snow, hail, sleet, graupel, etc).
Here's what you might see if you looked inside a warm cloud with just water droplets:

The collision coalescence process works best in a cloud filled with cloud droplets of different sizes.  A short video showed that the larger droplets fall faster than the small droplets.  A larger than average cloud droplet will overtake and collide with smaller slower moving ones.

This is an acclerating growth process.  The falling droplet gets wider, falls faster, and sweeps out an increasingly larger volume inside the cloud.  The bigger the droplet gets the faster it starts to grow.


The figure below shows the two precipitation producing clouds: nimbostratus (Ns) and cumulonimbus (Cb). A little more carefully drawn version than was done in class.  Ns clouds are thinner and have weaker updrafts than Cb clouds.  The largest raindrops fall from Cb clouds because the droplets spend more time in the cloud growing. In a Cb cloud raindrops can grow while being carried upward by the updraft and also when falling in the downdraft.

Raindrops grow up to about 1/4 inch in diameter.  When drops get larger than that, wind resistance flattens out the drop as it falls toward the ground.  The drop begins to "flop" around and breaks apart into several smaller droplets.  Solid precipitation particles such as hail can get much larger (an inch or two or three in diameter).