Category Archives: weather

  The interaction of the Lake and a sandy beach offers fascinating physical details: Water wets the sand changing both appearance and firmness. Waves move up and down the beach sorting sand and pebbles by size. Waves shift sand along the … Continue reading →

  After a few weeks of low cloud and rain, the skies cleared overnight. The inevitable result of moist ground, moist air, and radiative cooling was valley fog. Fog blanked the Lake. It gently drifted over the water and along the shore. … Continue reading →

  The skunk will have to wait. Last evening I managed to take the first good picture of a foraging skunk in a long time. I was about to post it, when a circumzenithal arc appeared in the sky. Nature’s … Continue reading →

  We have entered the season of the circumhorizontal arc—one of the most brilliant and colourful of all the haloes. Indeed at its best, it outclasses the rainbow. The circumhorizontal arc forms a horizontal line low in the sky, when … Continue reading →

  The title is not a typo: this is about sky lines, not skylines. White lines across the sky are easy to interpret: contrails (trails of condensation from aircraft). What about dark lines across the sky, such as seen in … Continue reading →

  There is nothing that says spring like the first guttation—not the arrival of swans, swallows, or robins, but guttation. It tells me that local plant metabolism is underway. Guttation is often confused with dew. Although superficially similar in appearance, … Continue reading →

  A sun dog (a parhelion) is so named because the colourful spot of light follows its master, the Sun, around the sky. Well, it follows the Sun if the cloud, in which the sun dog forms, persists. In this … Continue reading →

  Life in mountain valleys is usually life without sun pillars. The problem is that pillars are really striking only when the Sun is low in the sky. Around here, the Sun generally appears from (or disappears) behind a mountain … Continue reading →

  I went birding, and all I saw was lacunosus—but what spectacular lacunosus it was. Lacunosus occurs in thin clouds when bubbles of buoyant dry air from below the cloud rise and poke holes in the cloud. I have shown pictures of … Continue reading →