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My drive to work this morning was a spectacle of clouds. I've never seen cloud behavior like this.* And this requires audience participation, so get a pen and some scratch paper.
When I left the house, the sky was the drab gauzy gray of humidity. A solid slate of steam from horizon to horizon. Now draw an arc across your paper from the top third on the left to the bottom third on the right, like a lop-sided rainbow. Imagine the bottom of your paper is the dark gray of storm clouds, but without any texture. Imagine the top of your paper is still the light gray matte of morning clouds. This is literally what the sky looked like a block from work. I've never seen clouds behave this way. There was really a line in the middle of the sky with distinct colors on either side. Never seen this before!
Now take your pen again, and across the bottom part of the page and up through your arc, draw like you're trying to get a pen to write. Lots of big spirals. Take it higher and higher up the page until the full page is broiling with spirals. Within a block, the line in the sky was obliterated by stormy stormy clouds. The top clouds were lifted like a theater curtain to reveal the stage of thunderstorms. Like blowing sand off the top of a picnic table. Or the first strokes of icing a white cake with chocolate frosting.
By the time I parked in the parking lot, there was a stiff wind blowing spitting rain and the clouds were like lots of Poohs ("I'm just a little black raincloud"), bunches of them lower in the atmosphere, with the rain-all-day gray clouds higher. And now a steady drizzle from that rain-all-day drape. (You could turn your paper over to the blank side, if you want a visual.)
Like I said, really weird cloud behavior. But super cool!
*Don't worry. I was listening to the radio and knew there was a thunderstorm watch; no tornados or anything scary.
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