arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Heh heh - these wouldn't be the "pyramids" that Old Bob referenced a while back, would they? The Gympie Pyramids? Was that them?
Australia
- Thread starter Akhenaten
- Start date
HawaiiBigSis
List Management
So this was yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day. How cool are those? You all see them often?
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Nope.
Only in certain locations at certain times of the year. I've never seen them live.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
I've only seen these twice, from the ground and at some distance, so they were nowhere near as spectacular as the photo in your link. These clouds aren't seen by a lot of people, despite being regular and predictable, since they occur in areas of very low population.
One group, apart from meteorologists, that knows all about morning glory clouds is made up of glider pilots. They gather at the apropriate time of year and wait until conditions are just right and then "surf" these clouds for hundreds of miles as they roll across the desert.
My darling wife Vonnie has done it, and when I get a chance I'll go through her old gliding magazines and dig out an article on it.
Here's a picture of my intrepid airwoman at Leeton, NSW. No roll clouds here, but lots of lovely cu-nims!
Cheers,
Dave
Damien Evans
Up The Irons
I'd never heard of those clouds before.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Kewlies. All the more reason to do a write up on them. I'll get cracking.
Cheers.
Cheers.
Very, very cool!
Shirley there must be a woo 'explanation' for those as well? "Even the contrails are bigger in Australia". Or is it that Texas?
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Speaking of interesting flying . . .
This is a photo from Pi-Broadford/Strath Creek (the 78th Cataract) during the bushfires last February.
The Jet Ranger was just sitting there at a high hover, almost like it was mesmerised by what was in front of it.
This is a photo from Pi-Broadford/Strath Creek (the 78th Cataract) during the bushfires last February.
The Jet Ranger was just sitting there at a high hover, almost like it was mesmerised by what was in front of it.
"If ya can't hover, ya just can't."
- old jnugle saying
- old jnugle saying
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Burketown, Australia
© NASA
Very, very cool!
Shirley there must be a woo 'explanation' for those as well? "Even the contrails are bigger in Australia". Or is it that Texas?
From the Cloud Appreciation Society website
Kristianstad, Sweden
© Cloud Appreciation Society
While the Morning Glory tends to form at a much greater scale than anywhere else, similar phenomena can sometimes be seen travelling ahead of a storm. These more common roll clouds are formed by masses of sinking cold air (microbursts).
Dr Doug Christie, from the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, is an expert in large amplitude atmospheric wave disturbances, and is considered to be the world authority on the formation of the Morning Glory cloud.
Back in the 1970s, he became interested in some readings he’d picked up on the ultra-sensitive micro-barometer array at the university’s research station in Warramunga, central Australia. These he determined to be caused by very large individual waves of air.
He eventually traced these all the way back to the Gulf of Carpentaria region, 400 miles to the north. Since he first visited Burketown in 1980, Christie has conducted numerous experiments in this region of Australia and determined that the Morning Glory clouds passing over Burketown are visible manifestations of enormous individual waves of rising and falling air, many of which appear to originate over the Cape York Peninsula across the Gulf to the northeast.
As for the gliding, there are even poor people's options available:
Cheers,
Dave
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Damien Evans
Up The Irons
The hanggliding there reminds me of one of my uncles. He used to be a big-time hang glider until he nearly killed himself with a bad landing. Once he recovered he decided to switch to windsurfing instead. He's a little bit crazy, but a great guy.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I saw a documentary on some subscription TV channel some time ago about a glider who was searching for the morning glory. Otherwise I wouldn't have known about them either.
HawaiiBigSis
List Management
Thanks for that info, Akhenaten. I have to say they don't look quite as spectacular from the ground. But they're still quite weird and unusual. Interesting about the "waves" of air that causes them, and that those waves can be "surfed" by hang-gliders as well.
I have seen clouds similar to the picture taken in Sweden, and figured that the long straight edge was formed by some sort of wind resistance or something like it. Not possessing the ability to fly and see them from the sky, I don't know what they look like from on top.
Very interesting.
And it's somehow neater knowing that you all don't get to see them frequently. I was almost afraid that the response would be, "Oh, yeah. Saw those yesterday and last week too"!
I have seen clouds similar to the picture taken in Sweden, and figured that the long straight edge was formed by some sort of wind resistance or something like it. Not possessing the ability to fly and see them from the sky, I don't know what they look like from on top.
Very interesting.
And it's somehow neater knowing that you all don't get to see them frequently. I was almost afraid that the response would be, "Oh, yeah. Saw those yesterday and last week too"!
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
No, as Wolli pointed out, you have to be in the right place at the right time, and relatively few manage it.
Your comments about gaining a different perspective on things from the air ring very true for me. I've never ceased to marvel at the way the surface of the Earth leaps into three-dimensional reality as soon as you get airborne.
But perhaps even more amazing than the unfolding of the landscape is the realisation that the sky is three-dimensional as well. It seems to me that lifelong groundlings only ever see the sky in two dimensions, and only when you get up into it do you realise that it's a gigantic, rolling ocean, just like the big blue wobbly bit with mermaids in it.
I wonder if you thinking that roll clouds might be a familiar sight in Australia is like me sometimes thinking how kewl it would be to live in Hawaii and see volcanoes all the time.
Which reminds me. Did you know that some of the whales that visit Hawaii also come to Australia? If we could just figure a way out to saddle one of them we could have you over for a holiday, el cheapo.
HawaiiBigSis
List Management
You're right -- I do love to look at clouds from above. It's one of the reasons I love the window seats on airplanes, even if the trip is solely across an otherwise empty ocean. The clouds look very different from the top than they do from the bottom.
That's funny, because aside from the fact that I live on the side of a (currently) dormant volcano, all of the volcanoes within sight are mere remnants. So I live in Hawai'i, and haven't seen a tiny bit of "red" lava!
No I did not know that! It makes perfect sense, but I just assumed that all of our whales were Northern Hemisphere whales (mostly from lack of thinking about it, I imagine).
Traveling by whaleback would be seriously cool! Probably longish, and probably literally "cold", but still...
We all know what happened to Moby Dick, take the boat. The high plains in Victoria is another magic spot. The huge area was summer grazed till the dumb greenies stopped the leases, now it's waiting it's turn to burn. At times the fog can be so thick that a rider can't see the horses ears and try cooking a bit of tucker,summer time the bloody flies would carry you away. One spot has columns of granite in a hex shape. Looks like a smashed castle(not the Gympie ruins) Driving across once in May and got tired so we slept in the car, or should I say shivered till we just had to start the car for the heater. Easy to get into trouble as the weather can change so quick. (Reasons why I live in Qld)Across the area when I was a kid the cattle men had stocked huts that one could use if needed and people did, saved quite a number of lives. Now the shiney bums have had them all dozed. The cattle men used the huts as a base when rounding up the thousands of cattle in the fall and driving them to lower snow free country on both sides of the Great Divide. Romance memory is cold April morning big distant cloud of dust and the bellowing of cattle as they were driven down through the valleys just before winter.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Interesting. The land is more three dimensional for me when I'm on the ground. Flying flattens it, makes it look less three-dimensional, not more.
HawaiiBigSis
List Management
California has a similar feature: Devil's Postpile, although I always thought they were basalt, not granite. Something about the composition of the rock crystal; granite forms one way, the basalt formed hexagons.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
I didn't think I was expressing that very well when I first typed it. I should have acknowledged the thought and written it gooder.
I'll have another go.
You're right of course, and when you're up there at 30 000' the surface of the Earth looks just like a giant map. Funny that.
The heightened perception of three-dimensionality to which I referred only really occurs in between the ground itself and a few hundred feet above ground level (AGL). I'm not sure if it's a military or general flying term, but we referred to flying in this zone as 'nap of the Earth' (NOE) and it's here that one gains an appreciation for the three-dimensional nature of things.
When you're driving a car and you encounter a hill, you don't much have to worry about running into it, but if you're tearing along just above the treetops and the horizon is suddenly only a hundred metres away, then that third dimension becomes really important.
I think what I'm starting to ramble on about here is spatial awareness, rather than 'perception' and I'm not doing a very good job. I hope someone who knows about these things will chip in with a comment.
About all I can really say about it is that some people seem have very good spatial awareness, and are really good at things like crop dusting or stunt flying, and other people end their careers by simply flying into the ground because they lost awareness of their vertical situation. It doesn't seem to be a learned ability, but more a product of the different ways people are wired up.
Wolli, I'm getting off the track, and I haven't answered your point at all, but it's because I can't, not because I don't want to. I think we'd be safe to discuss it further here if you like and stay on topic because I can flavour my responses with local anecdotes from my own flying career.
Cheers,
Dave
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Bend yer backs and row me lads and take me to me whale!
