The tropics, my home, pt 2: A gallery of clouds

First off. I want to give a big thank you to all the people that have sent pictures of clouds in this effort. All of you have been properly given credit. A special shout out to my friends, and colleagues in the meteorology program at the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez, who sent enough pictures to make ten blogs!

VIIRS image showing Puerto Rico partly covered by clouds!

On the last chapter of this series I left off saying that I love weather in the tropics, but didn't quite explain why.  In this entry I will talk about something little kids seem to enjoy a lot... Well, in reality, many of us are still fan of. I am talking about clouds.

If you are ever going to do an outreach event for kids, make sure you include two things:
1. Can crushing (or anything that might make loud noises).
2. Pictures of pretty clouds.

In fact, let me be honest. If I went to a presentation that had pictures of clouds and cans suddenly being crushed, I would be very amused, and I'm 23. So it might work for most age groups (though for some reason you need a bigger can the older you get). When I was an undergraduate, our AMS chapter crushed a metal barrel, it was the best part of the whole Weather Festival! But that could be another story, today I am concentrating on the clouds.

Some developing cumulus clouds on a clear day, right after the passage of hurricane Irene. Photo courtesy of Janice Maldonado (UPRM)

Clouds are a very important part of our culture. I think this is probably true for most places in the tropics. It is not only because of hurricanes and the monsoon, but of rain in general. There are even stories based on clouds and precipitation. Watching these clouds, and hearing these stories were an important part of my life as a kid!

A. The Folklore


In many latin american cultures we say that when it rains with sunlight the witches are getting married.  There are many variations though, some mention the daughter of the devil instead. I have traced this myth all the way back to Italy and Spain, but have not found its origin as of yet.

I guess if you were under this cloud, and it rained you'd need to be on the lookout of a wicked wedding. Foto taken at Gan . Courtesy of Hannah C. Barnes (UW Atmospheric Sciences)

How about here? Do you think a witch might be getting married over the ocean? Actually, it looks a little bit like the background of this page! Foto courtesy of Dennis A. Negrón (UPRM Computer Engineering/Meteorology)

Another popular saying is that if you got soaked during the first downpour of May, it is said that you will become more attractive. An alternative version of this is that you will have good luck for the rest of the year. I used to believe this when I was a kid, so I would be eager to get wet when that first shower happened. Many kids in my elementary school did it too! I always wondered why my parents never got wet themselves, didn't they want to have good luck or get prettier?

Better hurry up and get over there or else you will miss out on all the potential good luck and beauty ! Photo by Dennis A. Negrón.

The last one I will mention (I'm sure there are more)  is that if it rains the day you get married, then your matrimony will be miserable. In PR this meant that you have to get married during Christmas because otherwise you will surely have a terrible marriage, especially during summer and fall!

Let's all hope nobody got married this day because surely something terrible had to happen to their matrimony. Photo from Anthony Ortiz (UPRM Physical Sciences/Meteorology)

B. Stormy Clouds


One of the best memories I had as a kid were those stormy afternoons when it just poured and poured. Sometimes it would just be raining in my neighborhood, so if you got on your car and drove for a minute, you'd get away from the rain.  But could those small clouds pack a punch! There would be lightning, roaring downpours. It was crazy! When that happened my mom would shout "uuuuuurraaaah" and put on music and start clapping for some unknown reason.

You better run home when you see the sky getting like this, it might get nasty soon!  Photo courtesy of Irmarís Rivera-Llanova (UPRM Physics/Meteorology)

 Later in college, when that happened, I would just skip class. No way was I going to get wet! What a terrible example I am setting, although most of the time I would get to the right place early enough (before noon), and avoid getting wet altogether. Trust me, there was no umbrella that could save you. In fact there was this one time the umbrella got blown away from my hands, what a sad moment that was!

Many interesting features in this picture here. It almost looks like it was taken from one of those severe weather documentaries. Photo courtesy of Anthony Ortiz 

Sometimes you get some pretty nasty rain, and after an hour or so you think it's almost over. Well think again, you may have another cumulus popping up and bringing down more water. Such cases were pretty common in Mayagüez, the city where I went to college.  The picture below shows how those days might look like.

I think one of my favorite things about this picture is how well defined the cauliflower form of the cloud is. That actually means this cloud is mostly liquid, unlike the wispier one in the background, which can be comprised more of ice. Photo from Dennis A. Negrón

We can't leave this topic without mentioning some of people's favorite events. This first picture shows some of the remnants of tropical storm Bonnie (2010) as the hurricane hunters flew to investigate it.  An interesting fact is that a lot of people think that PR gets hurricanes all the time. This is actually not quite true, we only get these storms every couple of years, and there are times in which decades pass without any major landfalls. For example, by the time hurricane Hugo (1989) passed by eastern PR,  there was already a large fraction of the population that had never lived through a major landfall event. The interesting thing about Hugo was that it devastated the eastern part of the island, while the western part barely felt anything at all (and our island is roughly 100 miles wide).

A look out the window shows a beautiful blue sky and some puffy clouds right were a tropical cyclone used to be.  If you  come from a hurricane-prone area, the probability of you liking hurricanes is very high. That's just how it is :). Picture courtesy of Rosimar Ríos-Berríos (UPRM Physics/Meteorology).

Other types of events include water spouts. The picture below shows a big one in Mayagüez (Sept 14, 2005). They're not as common as say, lightning,  but we do see them every once in a while.

C. After it rains

It has always puzzled me how we can have the most terrible weather, and then when it's all done, we get beautiful sunsets. Such is the case of the following pictures. All in all, it is just another day. I bet most people don't take the time the think about the many things they see in just one day, and even less sit down  and appreciate that today's sky is never going to repeat again, and tomorrow's is going to be just as unique! Sounds cliché and lame, but it's true!

Nothing beats a sunset right after a stormy afternoon. Here we see combination of withering clouds with combinations of orange yellow and blue.  Picture from Yésica I. Nieves (Clinical psychology, U. Carlos Albizu) 

Sometimes we can see bright colors in clouds themselves from reflection and scattering of light.  No better moment to see this than during a good sunset!

D. Too Much for a single blog entry

There is so much to talk about in this topic, and so many pictures to describe, that I cannot just take a single blog to talk about it all. In fact my series of the tropics is not even done yet! So I will close this chapter with some more nice pictures and will see you in the next entry of "The tropics, my home" !

The sun shines through these clouds. Can you guess how high up those clouds are? Picture courtesy of  Irmarís Rivera-Llanova.

The sun's shining right behing this big guy here. Gives it a majestic feeling doesn't it!  Picture courtesy of Rosimar Ríos-Berríos