Word: cirrus
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Weather does not always favor the celestial navigator. Far up where modern jets fly (up to 40,000 ft.), heavy clouds are rare, and the brighter celestial bodies generally shine through thin, high cirrus clouds. But at twilight, when the sun drops just under the horizon, there are anxious stretches when a navigator can spot no stars against a bright sky lit from below. If he is heading eastward, he soon flies into darkness, and his guiding stars reappear. But fast jets almost keep pace with the sun, and on westward flights the baffling, starless twilight may last for several...
Mason suspects that kaolinite and other "trainable" particles are carried up to 35,000 ft., where the temperature often falls to -60° F. There they gather a little ice, forming thin, veil-like cirrus clouds. When they fall through dry air, most of the ice evaporates, but tiny bits remain trapped in crevices. When these ice-seeded particles get mixed with a moderately cold cloud, they make it yield snow or rain. Mason argues that much of the earth's precipitation is wrung out of clouds by just such "trainable" earth-dust particles. Kaolinite and other kinds...
...minutes out of Langley, our Super Sabre whooshed over Virginia's Dismal Swamp to the cirrus-dappled air over North Carolina's Chowan River. This area was set aside for acrobatics, cleared of other aircraft. In the Super Sabre, Brett could have wafted into weightlessness by flying high and level, faster than sound, and pushing the plane's nose up into the Keplerian trajectory, in which centrifugal force exactly cancels the earth's gravitational pull. Despite his plane's vast speed reserve, he chose to work at lower altitudes, enter the parabola from a power...
Wish You Were Here. In Jackson, Miss., the U.S. Weather Bureau reported observing one morning at 11:35 ". . . unquestionably the most beautiful thing in all the heavens ... a magnificent display of iridescent clouds. We saw numerous splotches among the cirrus clouds of gorgeous opalescent rose pinks, emerald greens and turquoise blues. It occurred in a small area about 15 degrees from the sun and lasted only about 15 minutes. It can be fully explained, but only in the language of a meteorologist. However, it can be said that it was only a fragment of a giant halo due to unusually...
Everyone who has glanced aloft at the high, feathery cirrus clouds knows that they often move at impressive speed, but until the U.S. B-29s began bombing Japan, no one realized just how hard the high winds could blow. Sometimes the bombers were even blown backwards by head winds approaching 200 m.p.h...