Thursday brought a day nearly void of clouds as Mother Nature kept the skies a clear, blue canvas. But a few clouds snuck in and then had to go and show off.

This photo above was taken from Camano Island by Roberta Johnson.  The rainbow effect is from ice crystals in the cloud refracting the light like a prism.


 

With our hot and dry season in full force, it's also fast becoming wildfire season.

Here are some links to keep handy if and when the wildfires get going:

First of all, firewise.org will help you get prepared and what you can do to your property to lessen the risk of wildfire damage. Another good link is from the Department of Natural Resources

And finally, the National Weather Service has a great fire weather page that is a smorgasbord of current wildfire information, as well as forecasts and weather discussions.

Stay safe out there!

Many of us were wowed big time by this photo taken from space when Russia's Sarychev Volcano blew its top on June 12.

Now, it's bringing a show closer to home.

The ash and sulfur from the eruption have entered the high atmosphere and is being carried around the globe by the jet stream. The clouds arrived here late last week, and it made for some spectacular sunsets.

These photos were taken by Kevin Hossom who knew of the event and had his camera ready as he was driving across Eastern Washington toward Spokane. He noticed the sunset behind him and pulled off at the Moses Lake exit and grabbed these photos.

According to spaceweather.com, "The white ripples that herald these sunsets are made of volcanic aerosols--a mixture of ash and sulfur compounds. Blue light scattered by fine volcanic aerosols combines with ordinary red sunset rays to produce the telltale lavender."

Find more information at spaceweather.com, including a photo gallery of other photos from around the world

It looks like as of June 30, the effects are still travelling the globe, although it's more dispersed now. But with clear weather in the forecast across the Pacific Northwest into early July, keep an eye to those sunsets!

 

Imagine it raining golf balls around your home and your poor car is outside.

In Oklahoma, it's an occasional fact of life.

A local reader whose nephew, Joshua Loree, is at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater captured these incredible photos of some large hail stones that fell during a big thunderstorm on June 12. That one at the top looks about the size of a baseball!

In all, Loree suffered $2,500 damage to his car.

Hail forms when rain droplets get pushed higher into the atmosphere by strong upward winds. As the droplets go higher, it freezes into an ice stone known as hail. It then becomes heavier, and falls downward, picking up another coating of raindrops on its way down.

If the updrafts are strong enough, it'll blow the hail back up again, where the coating freezes, making the hail larger, then falling back downward. This process repeats until the hail is heavier than the updraft can support, when it'll finally fall to the ground. The stronger the updraft, the larger the hail stone will become.

It's said it takes an updraft of 56 mph for a hailstone to become golf-ball sized, so I gather the updrafts in this particular storm must have been even stronger.

Loree said he estimated wind speeds from the lower level of clouds running around 100 mph. He said those winds didn't translate as strong near the ground, but show the strength of the storm.

Here are some more photos he captured, with the final photo of Oklahoma State's stadium. Note the teal tinge to the clouds in the background -- that is a sign of hail in the atmosphere. I've seen this myself when in the MidWest -- it really is a gorgeous sight right up until you start getting pelted.

Anyway, the teal color is from the hail stones refracting the sunlight. 

Luckily hail doesn't get anywhere near that large in the Northwest because our storms are considerably weaker. Usually about dime-size is as big as we go, although we'll rarely get to nickel size in Eastern Washington and Oregon.

In case you are wondering, the largest hailstone ever recorded was a solid 7" in diameter, observed in Aurora, Nebraska in June, 2003. That's roughly the size of a soccer ball.

 

This has to go into one of the Top 5 most interesting cloud photographs I've seen.

The photograph shows the early eruption stages of the Sarychev Volcano in the Kuril Islands (northeast of Japan) on June 12, 2009.

It might look like a satellite photo, but believe it or not, it was taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. (Talk about a great view!)

But for me, the icing on the cake is the cloud on the top -- a feature you rarely see from the ground. It's a pileus cloud, and NASA says it was likely caused by "rapid rising and cooling of the air mass above the ash column."

There's plenty of other amazing atmospheric and meteorological events going on in this photo-- such as the ring of clearing around the volcano, likely caused by the eruption.

Read more about this photograph and the eruption (and find a higher resolution version of the photo) at earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Update: The Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site now has another version of this photo to be used with 3-D glasses.

Update 2: -- NASA has now released some video from the ISS: Here it is in Quicktime Format

(Special thanks to UW Research Meteorologist Mark Albright for pointing the original photo out.)

A new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research finds that nearly 90 percent of all Americans look at weather forecasts regularly, and many of them check at least three times a day!

Here is the full article for specifics:

www.ucar.edu

A friend sent me this interesting article that says scientists might have been measuring raindrops wrong all these years.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610185530.htm

(Despite this reserach, Seattle's dry streak was still considered broken Saturday night :) )