Meteorology 101

I told my sister, Monique, that in her spare time, she should start a blog. And, since she has very little spare time, she has no blog. But, I know that if she did have a blog, she would have posted this story, and since she does not, I feel it only fitting to include it here. You can thank me later for your meteorology lesson of the day.

Louisiana has been getting some crazy weather. Cold. Rainy. Snowy. The area meteorologists have been having a field day. Over the weekend, her boys were playing outside and saw a really crazy cloud. Zachary came running inside and said, "Mom, the mother ship is here go get Blake."

So, my sister went inside and sent a message to Margaret Orr, a local meteorologist, asking what they were looking at. In about two minutes, she got a response... It's a punch hole cloud. An airplane flew through a high cloud...it looked to be an alto stratocumulus cloud. You've most likely seen contrails before. This is moisture released by the plane as it flies. In very cold air, the moisture condenses. In this case it's ice crystals. The moisture from the cloud condenses on the ice crystals. They grow bigger, and begin to fall. That creates the hole. You see high clouds...cirrus clouds above the hole. The light hits that and creates the rainbow effect.

Here is a shot where you can see the rainbow.

So, there you have it. Pretty cool, huh?!?