Nature's Finishing Touch

Nature's Finishing Touch

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Nature touches our world with her beauty every day

Cloud

A cloud is a mass of tiny droplets of water or crystals of ice suspended in the air. The droplets and crystals form when the water vapor in the air condenses. Most clouds are formed when air containing water vapor rises in the atmosphere and cools. There are 3 main types of clouds:

cumulus - puffy and rounded; appear as individual masses; can become;

cumulonimbus (thunderhead or thundercloud) - vertical cumulus cloud; produces thunder and lightning; can produce heavy rain or snow showers; produces hail and strong gusty surface winds; produces tornados under the right conditions.
stratocumulus - thick and low; usually appears in a layer as parallel bands or irreguarly shaped masses; produces light drizzle.
altocumulus - similar to stratocumulus except occurs at a greater height and are thinner; have patchlike appearance.
cirrocumulus - high clouds that appear as small, flaky patches;

stratus - flat and layered; appear as uniform gray sheet; produces a light drizzle; can become;

nimbostratus - dark, shapeless, low, and ragged; almost always brings rain or snow for extended periods.
altostratus - flat, thick, and layered; appear as paraellel bands; can be streaked; high in sky; produces steady rain or snow.
cirrostratus - thin, veil-like layer that may cover entire sky and give it a whitish look; can creat a halo around the sun or moon due to the refraction of light by the ice crystals creating the cloud.

cirrus - thin, white; tend to be blown into long streaks; composed of ice crystals.

Did you know: Fog is really a cloud at ground level. A mackerel sky is wavey or rippled cirrocumulus clouds.

Geyser

A spring from which hot water and steam erupt periodically. Geysers were first seen in Iceland and called Gusirs. Old Faithful, in Yellowstone National Park sends a jet stream more than 100 feet into the air an average of every 65 minutes. Giant Geyser spouts every week or 2, sending up a jet about 250 feet.

Did you know: The tallest geyser was in New Zealand from 1901 to 1903 and sent up a black, boiling jet of mud, stones, and water as high as 1,500 feet.

Glacier

A glacier is a large sheet of moving ice. Glaciers began about 2,000,000 or more years ago and continued to within 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. In North America and Europe there were at least 4 great advances. According to various theories, the Ice Age may have been caused by one or more of the following:

Fluctuations in the amount of energy emitted by the sun.
Variations in the earth's orbit.
Shifts in the earth's crust relative to the poles.
Changes in the atmosphere that temporarily reduced the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.

All glacier movement was followed by a interglacial period when the giant sheets of ice stop and receed for a period of time. Scienctist do not know whether the Ice Age is really over; the present, some have speculated, may be another interglacial period to be followed by yet another coming of the ice. There are 3 types of glaciers:

Mountain (also called valley or alpine) - formed on a mountain; moves down into valleys; hangs over the mountain's edges (called a hanging glacier).
Piedmont - formed at the base of a mountain by 2 or more glaciers; can take on the characteristics of a continental glacier.
Continental - (also called an ice sheet or ice cap) - extremely thick mass of ice blanketing a vast area; dazzling white plain broken by crevasses (deep cracks) or occasional nunataks (peaks of buried mountains); often pushes into sea and breaks into ice bergs.

Did you know: Glaciers can move 100 feet a day.

Rain

A cooling of warm, moisture-ladden air creates the kinds of clouds that will produce rain. There are 4 intensities of rain:

trace - too small to be measured.
light - falls at a rate of up to 1/10 of an inch per hour.
moderate - falls at a rate of 11/100 to 3/10 of an inch per hour.
heavy - falls at a rate greater than 3/10 of an inch per hour.

There are 4 types of rain fall:

cloudburst - sudden, very heavy rain.
drizzle - drops measure less than 2/100 of an inch in diameter; can be considered light, moderate, or heavy.
shower - brief rain covering a comparatively small area.
sunshower - light rain from an almost cloudless sky.

Did you know: MountWaialeale, Hawaii has the world's greatest average annual rainfall of 460 inches. Arica, Chile has the lowest average annual rainfall with 0.03 inches. Parts of the nearby Atacama Desert are believed to have been without measurable rain for at least 400 years.

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