Everything You Want to Know About Clouds

Chuck Nice is such a hero for playing the listening ear in all of these discussions. He obviously knows more than he lets on but he plays "the audience" in a gracious and effective way.

I love how you bring up subjects I'd never care about on my own, and still get me hooked! Thank you, Neil

This kind of thing is my jam. I'm a glider pilot. And everything in this video are things we glider pilots constantly think about. A big puffy cumulus cloud signifies the top of a a rising air mass called a thermal. So if we circle beneath the cloud we can ride the rising air mass up to the cloud base. "If you watch it for five minutes...no one does this." Glider pilots do. We spend a lot of time (both when we are on the ground and in the air) trying to see where a cloud is starting to form or alternatively if a cloud is already there is it stable or is it starting to dissipate. We are trying to determine If I aim for that spot over there will there be a thermal beneath it by the time I get there? We also love cloud streets. If we get a day with nice streeting we can just hang out under a street and fly along without stopping to circle. Lenticular clouds (or lennies as we call them) also signify an area of strong lift that we can ride. A cirrus layer is typically a bad sign for us. That will normally reflect the sun preventing the sun from being able to heat the ground and the thermals will shut down. Or if the cumulus clouds start to overdevelop and start to form a sheet and the sky becomes overcast (known as a stratus layer) that will also shut down the thermals. If we are up and a cirrus layer or stratus layer starts forming we know we need to be looking for an airport so we don't end up landing in a farmer's field somewhere.

You guys have a great infographics person.

i never thought clouds could be cool and yet here we are

1. Good ol’ Fog: Simple, grounded and down to Earth 2. Those other Clouds: All high up in the sky, highfalutin, rainin’ on our parade

We all wish we had teachers like him in schools!

As a pilot (often doing bush piloting with no weather stations around), clouds are a thesaurus for decoding weather. A large portion of my time goes into reading them and getting familiar with local weather watching clouds. Cool video.

Chuck is the unsung hero of this show, he actually makes it more easier for the audience to digest all these scientific ideas that in another time would be hard to digest for people who are not science savvy or interested. Nice stuff.

If Chuck Ever Finds Himself Unable To Go To Work, I Will Gladly Come In And Cover For Him On Star Talk!