A gloriously sunny day, warm & no breeze. I don’t even have to put my gloves on to go outside.
Everybody else is cheerful too. The Governments Happiness Index may well have reached the heights of 8 out of ten – First Class.
On Monday Paul Simons reported on some NASA research which shows that the tops of clouds are no longer as high as they used to be; I was wondering if this might mean that the bottoms of the clouds have dropped too. If so, that could explain, in part, why we in the north & wet [Let that typo stand. Ed] of Britain have been drowning for the past few years while over in the south & east they are preparing for an official drought to be declared.I was standing at the bus stop on the day, last week, when the winter freeze suddenly lifted. There was quite a lot of blue in the sky & the sun was shining weakly. As usual there was a bowl of blue above the village (possibly because of the heat rising from human settlement?), ringed by stationary cloud to the north, east & south with more cloud coming in from the west.
I stood watching one particular line of small, fat, flat-bottomed clouds rushing as if borne by a stream of wind coming in from the west, about a mile to the south, above the transmitter. Because of the bowl of blue it was impossible to tell if the wind was also blowing at that height above the village.
The clouds all screeched to a halt as they ran into, & merged with, the banks of stationary cloud marooned above the Pennines. From where I stood they looked no more than about 500 feet above the transmitter, which would make them no m ore than about 1000 feet above sea level.
If the clouds are lower than they used to be, then that would explain why they are more likely to get stuck on the tops of the Pennines, unable to carry on & deliver rain to the east, just dumping it all on us instead.
Image credit: University of Auckland/NASA JPL-Caltech
