Iowa woman’s photo sparks push for new cloud type
- This June 20, 2006 photo provided on Monday, June 8, 2009 and taken by Jane Wiggins from a downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa office building shows what may become the first new cloud type to be recognized by scientists since 1951.
(AP Photo/Jane Wiggins)DES MOINES, Iowa – Looking out the 11th floor window of her law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera. The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she’d seen before. “It looked like Armageddon,” said Wiggins, a paralegal and amateur photographer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change.”
“They (the clouds) were the first ones that I noted of this type and I was unsure which category to put them under,” said Pretor-Pinney, author of “The Cloudspotter’s Guide.” “When we put pictures up online we list the category, and I wasn’t sure how to categorize it.”
Some scientists are skeptical. They argue that researchers who have long watched the sky haven’t seen anything distinctly new for decades.
There are three main groups of clouds: cumulous, cirrus and stratus. Each has various sub-classifications built on other details of the formation.
Brant Foote, a longtime scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the clouds photographed by Wiggins already fit into the existing cumulous classification.
But Pretor-Pinney, who never studied meteorology, believes the clouds merit their own cumulus sub-classification. He proposes they be called altocumulus undulatus asperatus. The last word — Latin for roughen or agitate — is a reference to the clouds’ undulating surface.
“Not necessarily gentle or steady, but quite violent-looking, turbulent, almost twisted in its appearance,” he said.
The group has compiled several photographs documenting the formations from the billowy, rolling clouds shot by Wiggins in Iowa to ones from New Zealand that were much more menacing, hanging lava-like in the sky.
Foote said it would be “very unusual” for such a formation to be recognized as a new variety of cloud.
“People have been looking at clouds for hundreds of years and the general cloud classification is well defined,” Foote said. “It’s not as if someone discovered a new plant in the Amazon. It’s what you’ve seen every day. There was no atmospheric condition that caused a new kind of cloud to form.”
Pretor-Pinney is working with the Royal Meteorological Society in Reading, England, to prepare his case. If that group signs off, the proposal will go to the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.
Society executive director Paul Hardaker said a small panel within the society is gathering evidence to review. Their efforts include talking with those who took the submitted photos to determinine when, where and amid what weather they were taken. Hardaker said meteorologists tend to be skeptical of such proposals.
“We like to believe that just about everything that can be seen has been, but you do get caught once in a while with the odd, new, interesting thing,” Hardaker said. “By this stage we think it’s sufficiently interesting to explore it further and we’re optimistic about the information we’ve got.”
Below are some other examples of this kind of cloud that I have had sent to me before.
Kansas City Missouri - 2006
Iowa, June 24, 2006
Eastern Idaho - November 2005
Eastern Idaho - November 2005
Neosho, Missouri Late 2005
- From Des Moines Station KCRG - 2007
Are they natural? That is a valid question. They are natural in the sense that they do occur in the sky on a rather regular basis. But, would they take form without the technologies that are presently in place to manipulate the atmosphere? That’s also a good question, and if I am allowed to speculate, I would say no. These clouds wouldn’t be photographed as frequently as they are without the stimulation of the planet’s Orgone energy field, artificial and space based introduction of gravity waves into the atmosphere and the additional host of other environmental manipulations that remain active to this very moment.
Is it time for a new cloud type? Probably so. But that then opens up a whole new can of worms. Clouds tweaked from above, clouds littered with chemtrail debris, clouds created by airfoils manufactured by these waves.
Don’t get me going now!
Huge Waves Detected in Atmosphere
- Gravity Waves - NASA - There are a variety of atmospheric waves, but many require radar to detect them. This NASA satellite image however shows more obvious gravity waves peaked with clouds off the coast of Australia.
June 4, 2009
– Researchers have detected giant, fast-moving waves of air, caused by thunderstorms and other disturbances, above Poker Flat, Alaska, where a new radar is churning out the first three-dimensional images of upper atmospheric phenomena in the polar region.
“People have been envisioning doing this project for 40 years,” said Eric Donovan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. “There’s just a lot going on in this region that we don’t understand.”
The radar combines 4,096 small antennas, each with its own transmitter, on a single instrument, rather than one giant dish equipped with one powerful transmitter. Rather than physically rotating the radar to point in different directions, the steering is done electronically by slightly phasing each of the antenna elements differently.
“All the previous systems would take half an hour to make measurements of a region that we’re interested in,” Donovan told Discovery News. “That’d be like keeping a camera’s exposure open for 30 minutes when you’re trying to take a picture of the finish of a race. All you’d see are streaks.”"It has the ability to essentially take three-dimensional pictures of the ionosphere whereas traditional systems can only look in one direction because of steering limitations,” added Michael Nicolls, a research scientist with SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.“This allows us, for example, to see wiggles in the ionosphere, and say ‘Yes, these are atmospheric waves’ and, in addition, figure out where they are coming from, which is very unique,” Nicolls wrote in an email to Discovery News.
With the new capabilities, scientists hope to be able to trace atmospheric waves to their source, such as a thunderstorm or air slamming into a mountain.
“By building up this 3-D view showing the waves, we can see where the sources are,” said Craig Heinselman, the principal investigator of the Advanced Modular Incoherent Scatter Radar, or AMISR. “It’s the first time we’ve been able to look, especially at high latitudes, in multiple directions simultaneously.”
Scientists have identified a few types of waves, some of which rip through the region of the atmosphere known as the mesopause, about 60 to 90 kilometers above the planet, and others in the thermosphere, roughly 200 to 300 kilometers in altitude.
The waves can be hundreds of kilometers long and travel at half the speed of sound.
“They are really enormous,” Heinselman said.
Scientists will soon be expanding their view with a second AMISR system at Resolute Bay in Nunavut, Canada, which is within the polar cap.
“It is really uncharted territory,” said Nicolls. “Who knows what we will find.”
Nicolls and other scientists presented results from AMISR Poker Flat research at the American Geophysical Union conference in Toronto last week.
Wiggins captured a photo of the creepy clouds and now weather watchers are pushing weather authorities to create a new class of clouds. (Bet you didn’t know there were “weather watchers” OR “weather authorities”). However, Brant Foote, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, says the “new” clouds really aren’t new at all: “It’s not as if someone discovered a new plant in the Amazon. It’s what you’ve seen every day. There was no atmospheric condition that caused a new kind of cloud to form.” Emphasis added…
Across the pond in Spain, an atmospheric scientist snapped a photo of a strange, jellyfish-shaped lightning, called a “sprite.” Sprites, first discovered in 1989, are dark-red flashes of light that appear high above thunderstorms, lasting only 3-10 milliseconds. Scientists still don’t know what causes the spooky sprites to appear, which have been linked to UFO sightings.
