These photos don't do it any kind of justice, but: I was just looking out the window, and there was one set of full, high up clouds blowing slowly north, and another, thinner set blowing south/southeast. Kinda cool, kinda creepy.
I first thought the lower clouds could have actually been fog, but then I thought, "isn't fog just a kind of cloud?" Fortunately, wikipedia, which is Never Wrong(TM), confirmed my understanding of fog as simply a type of cloud, that happens to touch the earth's surface.
At least these images show what the view to the east looks like before the leaves start to change and fall in earnest.
1 comment:
It might be more unusual if the clouds at different altitudes were all going in the SAME direction. You can count on the winds at increasing altitudes to come from a different direction and speed. When doing flight planning you actually sometimes pick your cruise altitude based on how much of a headwind you have or not.
Given today's forecast you can see that the winds near the surface were coming from the north (350 degrees) were blowing in just about the opposite direction of winds at 10000 feet where the broken layer of clouds was (wind from the south (190 degrees).
If you're curious to check the forecast winds aloft you can use this page to find the wind direction/speed from 3000 on up:
http://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/Winds/Aloft.cgi?course=azimuth&hour=06&location=ANC
3000 120 @ 33 mph
6000 150 @ 19 mph
9000 190 @ 20 mph
12000 190 @ 18 mph
To get surface winds you could use this:
http://gc.kls2.com/airport/ANC
Look at the Terminal Area Forecast (TAF) lines:
TAF: PANC 091739Z 091818 35005KT P6SM FEW010 SCT050 BKN100
Which you can interpret as:
PANC == ICAO name for the Anchorage airport
091739Z == the 9th day (today) at 17:39 Zulu/GMT (i think -8hrs to get ADT, so 9:39am local time)
091818 == forecast valid until 18:18Zulu (which is a short amount of time, so the weather is probably changing... it is followed by additional lines not shown in this comment).
35005KT == winds at the surface will be at 5 knots from 350 degrees.
P6SM == visibility of 6 statute miles
FEW010 SCT050 BKN100 == with a few clouds at 1000 ft, scattered clouds at 5000 ft, and broken clouds at 10000 ft
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