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Clouds spread across the sky
Small ones grow
Darken and throw
Water darts onto the ground
Streaming rain falls down
Clouds disintegrate
As sunset arrives.
Without clouds the earth grows cold.
Frost fixed white on the ground
Then floating high
More clouds arrive
In our skies..
It might rain today, but most of England is parched. The south east, south midlands, and eastern counties look dry and brown from satellite images. We are in the same heatwave that has affected the rest of western Europe. Forecasts say the weather is due to break soon. But with thundery showers due there is not the persistent rain for many days that would replenish the ground water and because the soil is so hard and dry it is compacted and heavy rain could cause flash flooding…. Oh well, Brits always discuss the weather!
Parts of Britain and France are turning brown, fires are burning in France. Its happening across Europe. Its happening in America. Where has the rain gone? Crops are withering in places where the monthly rainfall has dwindled to almost nothing. Will the climate recover? Will rainfall be abundant again? The weather has only been overheated for a short time, but the damage is being done. What will happen in the future if we don’t reduce Carbon emissions and slow the increase in temperature we are currently experiencing? We are such a destructive species and we have started to overwhelm Earth. We only have one planet. Let’s try and take care of it.
Loved tonight’s sky, even though we are on the wrong side of the hill…our house is in shadow about two hours before the sun sets. We get good silhouettes! I grabbed my phone and took a picture. If I’d wanted to get to the sunset I would have had to jump in the car, turn round, drive up and over the hill and find somewhere to park. As it was these colours were fleeting, lasting only a few minutes. I only saw it because the light reflected into our kitchen and made it glow.
I want the skies to darken, the winds to rise, I want a swirling storm, dancing leaves. Gusts and gales and the patter of heavy raindrops! I thought we were having that earlier but realised it was water pattering down on the kitchen roof from the hose! Instead of watering the plants he was watering the roof! He thought it would cool the air. Its 15°C cooler today than yesterday! We need relief for humans and the countryside. But not just here, worldwide. The trouble is its not just one country suffering.
Thunderstorms were forecast but haven’t happened yet. I’m watching www.http://blitzortung.org to see where the storms are. They seemed to be concentrated around France and Switzerland earlier on…..
I continue to play with multiple photos, mostly I don’t know what I will get as an image. I rotate the photos round. When I do that you get four versions of a picture. In this case by having the dark areas at the top and bottom, and putting the curved white cloud towards the centre I get an apparent smile. But look closely at the horizontal centre of the picture you can vaguely see two eyes? My pareidolia again….
I tried to look up what these clouds might be so I checked Wikipedia. I thought they were castellated cumulus, but now I think they are Altocumulus_castellanus_cloud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altocumulus_castellanus_cloud
The clouds in the photo are a bit more broken up than these but they do seem to have a sort of towering effect. Anyway there are so many cloud types and shapes, and new types are being identified, like Asperatus. Can you tell I like clouds?
I tried to take a photo earlier on of a real sunburst breaking through the clouds behind our house. But for some reason it didn’t save. So when I came out of choir practice I was pleased to see this.
As usual my pareidolia kicked in. I think I can see a woman floating through the sky. One arm extended, a crown or a cake suspended above it. There are shadows cast by one lot of clouds onto the ones above them, and I love the colours, the dusky pinks and purples especially.
When the wind blows the sky changes. Heat is coming and clouds may be fleeing this weekend. Warnings of temperatures above 30`C are expected. High UV is predicted.
The British don’t really do ‘heat’, we go abroad for it, but we are more used to summers of wet weather, music festivals in mud, Wimbledon or cricket rained off. A summer can last a day as far as we are concerned. We even have Saint Swithens day. A day in July? If it rains on that day we can expect continuous rain for the next forty days and nights… And sometimes that seems to come true! One year I joked with friends that we should build an ark on high ground it rained so much….. Sunshine, nice for a day or two, but Britain appear to appreciate clouds. X
The skies gone a dirty grey brown colour and the forecast is for heavy rain showers or even thunderstorms. The sun won’t be setting for at least another hour, but as they say round here ‘its gone dark over Bill’s mums!’ in other words it’s going to rain soon! In fact as I write this I can hear raindrops drumming against the window. It did try and hail earlier on and there were little grains of ice on the car windscreen.
Mallaband-Brown