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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.
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Oh, hey, it's that lady who's both a stranger and also your internet dad, Allie Ward, back with a light and a fluffy episode of Ologies. Ooh, things are getting dark and stormy, or maybe puffy and beautiful and shaped like a dinosaur because it's clouds. And this is Smologies. And Smologies are versions of our classic episodes that we've edited down to be shorter, and we've also taken out any language that might be objectionable. So
So it's safe for kids and it's safe for all ages. If you are looking for the full version of Clouds and you got some more time and you're not around smallagites, then the full length version is linked in the show notes. But if you're here for the smaller, shorter episodes that are G-rated...
Okay, this is a big one. It has been looming overhead since the first time I encountered a list of possible ologies. This was over a decade ago. And I remember seeing Nephology and thinking immediately like, who does that? Who is one? And it was on my mind like a puffy thought bubble over my head so much that if you listen to the ending theme music, you will hear...
So, of course, you know I'm pumped to get my head into the clouds for this. Okay, nephrology is the study of clouds. Okay, this is very much a real word. It can mean a scientist of clouds or just someone who likes to gaze up and look at the clouds and would hug a cloud if they could and is like...
Clouds are tight. Now, neph comes from the Greek for cloud, straight up, but it is not to be confused with the objects of nephrology, which has an R in it. That means the kidneys, your P organs, which we will explore another time, I promise. Okay, so this ologist, this nephologist, I happened upon on Twitter and she was like, hit me up for that cloud chat anytime. I was thrilled. I
I was nervous. She came over to my house. We sat on my couch with my sleeping indoor raccoon, Grammy, just inches away. And we looked out at the atmosphere while we discussed what is a cloud? What are they called and why? What ancient weather adages can we actually rely on? Diamond rain and clouds shaped like everything under the sun with atmospheric scientist, professional cloud looker-atter, and nephologist, Dr. Rachel Storer. ♪
Allergies? Smologies? Mologies?
Do you know that you are a nephologist? I didn't until you said that word. I was going to ask if people call you a nephrologist a lot, but they don't even call you a nephologist. No, nobody calls me that. No. Some of my friends call me a cloud doctor, which I use that one for some of my like social media and stuff. I just think that sounds neat. A cloud doctor cloud. Let's get to the nitty gritty. What is a cloud? What is it? It's water.
In the air. It is. It is a lot of water in the air. Okay. So if you like look at just a regular cloud, I think I'm going to probably get the numbers wrong, but it's literally can be like a ton of water in a cloud. But the droplets are just so, so small. And, you know, they just can like hang out there in the air and the light reflects off of them. And there's enough of them that we see it as white or gray or whatever. So you're looking at a cloud and you're like, it's bright.
Puffy, it's light, it's in the air. And it's just an absolute ton of water above your head. And the reason it's a cloud and not a puddle is... I don't know. Well, so all the droplets are really small. I mean, literally like...
tens of microns across this cloud droplet. And so it's just so light, it has so little mass that just like the little bits of air moving up and around are enough to sort of keep it in place. And so it's, you know, it's not until the drop gets big enough until it forms like a rain droplet that it's sort of heavy enough to fall on its own. So there is a tipping point, obviously, in clouds where there's enough water vapor that condenses where the droplets can't be buoyed by the air underneath it.
Yeah, sort of. Like eventually there's just enough water. And, you know, the more water you have in a cloud, the more the water is going to bump against other water droplets and they start to stick together. And, you know, water vapor will condense directly onto water droplets and they'll grow as long as it's moist enough. And then, yeah, eventually the drops will get big enough that they'll fall. Oh, OK. So let's.
Talk about shapes of clouds. Okay. The sort of two main types you said are stratus and cumulus. And so the sort of difference there is that cumulus clouds are convective, which means that they form because there's air that's sort of warmer than its surroundings and it bubbles up. Like you would have bubbles in boiling water or whatever. You just have air that bubbles up. And so that's sort of why they tend to be like poofy and bumpy on the top and stuff like that. Skies always have little fluff.
And those are the ones that tend to, if you're going to have storms, that those are convective clouds. So those are the puffy, fluffy, cotton candy clouds or the cumulus. And then there's the stratus. Yeah. So stratus, literally the word like strata means layer. So stratus clouds are generally layered, which means that they're sort of forming from sort of a larger area that's rising a lot more slowly. So like over the ocean where things are generally, you know,
sort of similar everywhere, then you tend to get like stratocumulus over the ocean. Or if it's like a really rainy, drizzly day, a lot of times that will be like, there'll be like a front coming through that's sort of larger. And so there's, you know, a big air mass that's just sort of moving slowly up. And so you get sort of these flat sort of layered clouds. Oh, so it's like a pancake is a stratus cloud and a cumulus is a muffin.
Yes. Okay. Yeah. I'll take it. And then I guess maybe would a stratocumulus be like a waffle? Sure. Okay. Why not?
So hungry. And so then, okay, what are some other types of clouds? Like what is a pyroclastic cloud or a lenticular? Like what are all these terms? So pyrocumulus clouds are really cool and also terrifying and kind of sad because they're what happens when you have fire. Pyro, right? So pyrocumulus is basically when you get so much heat from the fire that it forces convection on its own.
P.S. Why should anyone care about the meaning of convection when it's not being used to describe an oven that's making me cookies? Well, convection just means a circular current or gas or liquid is less dense and it rises and then the cooler stuff is more dense and it falls. And this happens in weather patterns a bunch because the surface of the earth is warm, so it heats air. That air rises and then the cooler air above it falls.
that gets heated by the earth, that rises, etc., etc., which, let's be honest, is almost as cool as cookies. That's pretty interesting. Now, pyrocumulus or flammagenetous clouds have terrible names, but they look like
fluffy, puffy, billowy, pillowy steam clouds. And so you get these really strong, really crazy, cauliflowery, convection-y sort of clouds that form. I mean, I've seen them here over the mountains sometimes, occasionally when we've gotten bad fires. Oh my God. And what about a lenticular cloud? What's that? Lenticular clouds are awesome. But a lenticular cloud is a wave cloud. So it forms when air is forced over a mountain. And...
So if the atmosphere in general is kind of stable, then when air goes up, it'll sort of go back down again and it'll go sort of up and down in like this like large wave. And in the parts where it goes up, a cloud will form if conditions are right. Yeah.
And so you get sort of this-- there are these-- people call them like UFO clouds. A lot of times they have almost this UFO shape to them because they just form in the little top part of this wave. And so you get all these really cool-- and sometimes they build up on top of each other. When I lived in Colorado, we used to get the most amazing lenticular clouds.
And also, if you ever look at pictures of Mount Rainier in Washington, sometimes they'll form on top of the mountain and you'll get this really cool layered... It's hard to describe with just words, but... Oh, I'm going to look it up. Yeah. Y'all, are you sitting? Have you seen a lenticular cloud? They look like...
sky pancakes or UFOs or like stacks of Hanukkah gelt. And the word lenticular comes from lens shaped like a bulging disc of a lens. Also, the word lens, are you even capable of dealing with this right now? I don't think you are. It comes from the Latin for lentil. So these giant disc-like clouds are like big lentil pillows. And lentils
I'll be honest, I think I just crossed the line to wanting to join the Cloud Appreciation Society, which is a real thing. You mentioned Nimbus and Anvil clouds. What are those? Yeah, so Nimbus means rain. Oh, it does? Yeah. I never knew that. I did not know that. Okay, wow. That's amazing. Okay.
So cumulonimbus is like a thunderstorm, basically. It's a fancy name. Yeah, that's... And then anvil clouds are... So literally, the top of the troposphere is called the tropopause, and then above that is the stratosphere. And that layer of that transition is really, really stable. So air that goes up can't really go farther than that. And so when you have a storm cloud that goes up, it goes to the tropopause, and the air doesn't have anywhere to go. The clouds don't have anywhere to go, and so they spread out.
And that's where, and it's, they're called anvil clouds. Cause if you look at the shape of them where they sort of like peek out and point out or whatever, they look sort of like an anvil. Oh,
Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. Quick aside. I looked them up and these thunderstorms do in fact look like anvils and their full name is Cumulonimbus incus. And the cumulo means heaped. So they're like a bunch of heaps of whipped cream. And the nimbus means rainstorm. And incus in Latin just means anvil. So when this rising air hits the tropopause, that's the boundary between the lowest level of our atmosphere and the next level stratosphere. Okay.
So the cloud hits that and it was like, ow, shoot, that's a ceiling. Okay, I'm just going to casually fan out. I'm going to act normal. Hopefully nobody noticed. It doesn't even know how cool it is. How does a cloud even form? You need the sort of basics that you need are moisture and something for the moisture to condense onto.
and you need rising motion. So if you have air that's rising for some reason, like for a convective cloud, it's because you have warm air that gets buoyant. It's warm in the air around it. Or like I said, if you have air that's moving over a front or over a mountain, then when the air moves up, as air goes up, the pressure goes down, and therefore, the air gets colder.
It's funny that something so beautiful that we see every day is so complicated. You know what I mean? And that's part of what I love about it, right? I'm like, okay, dew point, saturation, vapor, pressure. You don't want to hear these things. Those are great. Those are great points. Okay. So you've heard the dew point. So the dew point is the...
The temperature at which water would condense given the amount of moisture that's currently in the air. Right. So the higher the dew point, the more humid it is. Okay. So as you raise air, it gets cooler. And so eventually it'll get to where it equals the dew point of that sort of bit of air that's rising. Okay. And so at that point, condensation can happen. Oh, okay.
Okay, so quick recap. The dew point is the temperature that water would start to condense and a 50 degree dew point is pretty comfy, but a 70 degree dew point is just getting into swamp bottom territory. Now living in LA, this dew point info was new to me. I had not the foggiest idea.
And when does something become a cloud if it's foggy? You know what I mean? Is fog a cloud? Fog is a cloud. Fog is just a cloud that's touching the ground. It's literally all it is. How far does it have to go before it's a cloud? Just above your head? Is that a philosophical or a meteorological question? I mean...
it's one of those like fuzzy things because it's funny like I you know if you fly through a cloud right like when are you in the cloud and when are you not in the cloud right because there's like all these little water droplets and at some point it's enough that you can see it but
But if you look at it with like a LIDAR, there's a lot more that you can't see because it's just too small or too sparse or whatever. You know, so at what point is it a cloud versus not a cloud, right? It's not like there's weird hard boundaries. Right. So, you know, touching the ground versus not like...
You know, give me wiggle room. Okay. Do you look for faces in clouds? Do you still look for shapes in clouds? I don't really go out of my way to. I mean, if I see it, I'll, you know, take note of it or whatever. But I tend to, I mean, I tend to just sort of like stare agog at them, you know, just like, oh, it's so pretty. So we sat on my couch staring at the sky, which was hazy with
stripy things in it. They were probably stratus or cumulus, right? Um, what is the, what are these today? These are stratus. Those are cirrus. What is a cirrus? So cirrus is a really high up basically. Oh yeah. So, um, there's sort of like three kind of like levels, um, that we sort of think about in terms of like the heights of the clouds or whatever. Um,
And so the higher up ones are cirrus. The middle ones are like alto. So we have like alto stratus or whatever. And then the low ones are like just like the stratus or cumulus or things like that. So you can tack on a prefix to tell you where in the sky it is. Yeah. I have so many Patreon questions. Are you ready? Yeah, sure. Okay.
She is ready. But first, before your Patreon questions, each week we make a donation to a cause of theologist choosing. And this week, given the chat about pyrocumulus clouds and the wildfires in Australia, Rachel chose the World Wildlife Fund's charity,
Australian Wildlife and Nature Recovery Fund, which supports veterinarians who are treating injured wildlife and provides food and water to critters in impacted regions. They use koala detection dogs to help rescue them and to find other threatened species, and they get supplies to triage sites. So thank you, Rachel, for picking that. And that donation is made possible by sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now.
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Look at me. Even I did it.
Thank you.
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OK, back to your cloud questions. Aki wants to know why are clouds white? Yeah, I sort of got this a little bit earlier. Because you have a lot of droplets all in the same place, and the light bounces off of them and gets scattered, I guess they add on all of the different directions. And so that looks to our eyes like white, basically.
First time question asker, Navarro, wants to know, in places like Brooklyn, big up, it's overcast almost every day, only in the winter. No visible sun, just a silvery white haze blanketing the entire sky. I actually got curious and Googled it the other day. Turns out the explanation is nephological in nature. So can you please explain? And Jack Poirier and Courtney Ryan also have those questions about why is it cloudy in the winter?
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm from Pennsylvania originally. And so I know the gray skies of winter. Yeah. So a lot of it is just the kind of clouds that tend to form. So, you know, a lot of like the stratus clouds, like I said, form when the atmosphere is stable. And so you get sort of like these blankety, the stratus clouds. And in the winter, generally the type of weather that happens tends to be that type of weather. And we don't get a lot of sun, right? That, you know, the Earth
The earth's tilt is like such that we're not getting a lot of sun that time of year. And so like the ground's not heating up a lot. And so you don't get a lot of like convective clouds or anything like that. And so a lot of the stuff is just strategy overcast sort of stuff. I'm from San Francisco and I just call that sunscreen. I myself, a foggy day. Oh, yeah.
Soup weather. JK, JK. The Skin Cancer Foundation says that up to 80% of the sun's UV rays can pass right through clouds. So sunscreen just wants to be friends. It's here to help. Use it. A lot of people, of course, want to know about climate change. Emily Elaine Laborde, Nikia Wooten, who's a first-time question asker, Haley Everson, first-time question asker, also Sarah Dez, and Jay, Julie Bear, Shmini Thompson, and J. New.
They all want to know, in Haley's words, will climate change affect the clouds we see? And will certain types of clouds become less common or even go extinct?
Ooh, okay. So it's a really complicated question that we don't really know the answer to. But I mean, the short answer is yes, it will change things. As it gets warmer, sort of can like shift climate patterns around. And so, you know, places that maybe weren't warm enough for there to be like a lot of convective clouds might get more of those or can sort of shift where the main like storm track regions happen.
And then there's also like over the oceans, there's like these large stratocumulus layers and there's a lot of open questions as to how those will change. You know, there wouldn't be a cloud that would go extinct. That would make me very sad. But it's just it's more about like small shifts. And the important thing there is like how that affects like the radiation, because there's all these feedbacks with warming and how it affects the precipitation. Those are the sort of more important questions for scientists.
you know, what we actually want to understand. Yeah. Are we going to get drier as we get warmer? So it depends on where you are. Um, there's one of the sort of things that gets thrown a lot is this like rich get richer idea where the places that are moist will get moister and the places that are dry will get drier, um, which is unfortunate, right? Like, you know, if you live in a place that's like prone to flooding, you don't want more of that. And if you live in California, you don't want more drought. Like there's a lot of indications that that
might be the way things are going. Yeah. I know that this is probably a question you get a lot. The difference between weather and climate. Yeah. Do you have to explain that a lot? It's a first step a lot of the time because people, a lot of times when people have doubts about climate change, a lot of it is like they have all these distrust of the models that we use or people will just be like, oh, it's cold. Where's that global warming, right? Yeah. So there's like a lot of really cool analogies for it that I try to remember, but...
So like one of the obvious ones is that the climate is the clothes that are in your closet and the weather is the clothes that you wear. Ha ha ha ha. That's a great way to get people to understand the difference, you know. Elizabeth Gagne wants to know, why do cumulo nimbus clouds appear to us as such crazy colors like yellow and green and purple? So it depends on sort of what's in them and how the light is scattering. Yeah.
Like the darker that a cloud is, usually the more stuff is in it, right? Because it's blocking the light above it. Like if it's really dark overhead, there's sort of like more moisture in that cloud, right? Like if it rains, the clouds overhead are usually like really dark gray. Sometimes a cumulonimbus cloud will tend to look greenish and often that means that there's hail in it.
What? Because of just the hail is really big and it just scatters light in a different way. And so a lot of times, like if there's hail in a cloud, it'll have this sort of greenish tinge to it. Yeah. And then if you get clouds like on the horizon at all, you get all sorts of different color effects because of the angle of the light and the way that it scatters and stuff. Eliza Gaston wants to know, how much truth is there in the saying red sails at night, sailors delight, red sails in the morn, sailors be warned?
You ever heard that? Yeah, I've heard it. Red skies at night. Sailor's delay. Sailor's delay. Yeah. There is actually some truth to it and it has to do with the kind of clouds that you get. And it's like if you have like an approaching weather system versus something that's just passed where you'll see like serious clouds and the way that the light scatters off of them and stuff like that.
So this adage is attributed to everyone from Shakespeare to Jesus, literally. And the logic behind it is, to quote the Library of Congress, when we see a red sky at night, this means that the setting sun is sending its light through a high concentration of dust particles. And this usually indicates a high pressure and stable air coming in from the west. Basically, good weather will follow. And a red sunrise can mean that good weather has been
and if it's deep, fiery red, there may be a lot of water in the atmosphere, end quote. So red skies in the morning, gather your galoshes, which means if you live in LA, you could start canceling your plans. We don't do rain. Lauren Kipperall wants to know, how heavy does a cloud need to be before it rains?
Yeah, so it's not necessarily about the heaviness of the cloud. It's sort of about the heaviness of the drops. Okay. There has to be enough water so that, like, rain can form. You know, a raindrop has to be sort of a certain size before it's big enough, heavy enough to fall through there. Ballpark, like, a raindrop is like...
I don't know, a millimeter or something like that. Okay. Ish. Pandora 2 says that my son, Shay, who's nine and is a first time asker, wants to know why are clouds never square? Oh, that's neat. I like that. Kids ask the best questions. Because I would say probably because of like turbulence and air is always moving around and stuff like that.
Plus, there's all this sort of chaotic stuff that happens on the small scale in clouds where just because you have sort of similar conditions right here, they won't be exactly the same 10 feet away. And so maybe you'll get a little bit more cloud here than you get there. And it's all kind of uneven. But they're flat on the bottom. They're pretty flat on the bottom. Melissa Croce wants to know, first time question asker, what do we know about clouds on other planets, if anything? Are there different types of clouds on those planets?
Yeah, so the neat thing about clouds on other planets is that a lot of them aren't water clouds, which is like just sort of mind-boggling to think about because the temperatures are like so much colder, for instance, that you can get like methane clouds. What? Stuff like that. Yeah, so that's pretty neat. Okay, I checked into this and NASA JPL researchers have calculated that in the methane stormy regions of Saturn, it could rain up to 2.2 million pounds of diamonds annually. Wow.
You have a crush on Saturn now, don't you? If you like it, you're going to have to put a ring on it. Rings. Okay.
You know what's funny about that is when I picture it raining diamonds, I picture it like cut gemstones and not just rocks. I picture that too. There's an episode of Doctor Who, I think, where there's like something like that, some sort of diamond planet. Like they're already cut and polished like the diamond emoji. I picture the same thing. And you're like, ow, ow. What do you love the most about clouds or your work or about being a nephologist, which you now know you are? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I just love that, like, on a day when my work is making me grumpy, that I can just go outside and look at the sky and be like, oh, right, that's the thing that I'm studying, like, this cool thing. And, you know, I get to work with other people who get excited about it, too. Like, the few days of the year that we do get a storm come through, there's, like, a couple of us that are, like, really, like, the weather weenies in the group that'll be, like, outside, like, huddled on the side, like, oh, my gosh, there's actual weather. Yeah.
Well, I would say that you're a ray of sunshine, but you're really, I feel like that's an insult in your work. So you're just a very, you're a very dense and deep, dark, stormy cloud. And I mean that as a compliment. Okay. That's the best kind of cloud, right? I love them.
So as always, meet smart people and then invite them in to ask them questions. And we're at Ologies on Twitter. Come be friends with us on that. And on Instagram, we're at Ologies. Also linked is AllieWard.com slash Smologies, which has dozens more kid-safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through. And thank you, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media for editing those, as well as Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas.
And since we like to keep things small around here, the rest of the credits are in the show notes. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I give you a piece of advice. And this week's advice is to have a little note going when you hear someone mention that they like something and you can jot it down. That way, when their birthday rolls around or they need a little surprise treat to make their day, you say, oh, that's right. They love bubble gum or oh, that's right.
Unicorn stickers are their favorite. That way, in the moment, you don't have to rack your brain for something to get them. I keep a list going of things that my loved ones like. That way, I remember when their birthday comes around where to start when it comes to a gift. Sometimes, I make a little list of things that I want a couple weeks before my birthday. That way, if anyone asks me what I want for my birthday, I say, oh, I remember. And there are a few little tiny treats that I'd like. Okay, bye-bye.
Momogies. Momogies.
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