Sidetracked Charley

Smoke Column from the Pacheco Fire Before I moved from Questa, New Mexico and divorced my husband, who died this last year, I spent 22 days on the front lines of the Hondo Fire. Never did the wind change in any way that I was not instantly awake and alert. I or Marc got up every two hours for weeks to look at the mountain across the valley. The fire and the potential of fire dominated our lives. There is something about the smell of smoke in the air that dominates it to this day. Clouds of a certain color make my hyper alert. Yesterday the Pacheco Fire in the Santa Fe National Forest sent up a column of smoke 30,000 feet into the atmosphere. I was instantly tharned. Post traumatic stress disorder (also known as post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD ) is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma. This event may involve the threat of death to oneself or to someone else, or to one's own or someone else's ...

Lenticular Cloud Not my picture. In fact not my cloud or my mountain though I find myself longing for both. But I used to have tons of pictures of lenticular or wedding cake clouds. Another loss to the computer nerd. And clouds we seem to have lost to current weather (or lack thereof). But I thought I saw some beginning lenticular's yesterday. Lenticular clouds ( Altocumulus lenticularis) are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes, normally aligned perpendicular to the wind direction. Lenticular clouds can be separated into altocumulus standing lenticularis (ACSL), stratocumulus standing lenticular (SCSL), and cirrocumulus standing lenticular (CCSL). Due to their shape, they are often mistaken for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Per Wiki My pilot father was known to say that Lenticular's heralded a change in the weather. They often position themselves between wet and dry fronts. And here in the mountains of New Mexico we see them, this time...

Lorenz Attractor Thought I would talk a walk on the wild side this morning: Science's attempt to explain the unexplainable - Chaos Theory. Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions; an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect . Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simp...

I love clouds. I could photograph them forever with their ever changing forms and colors. There is a wonderful segment in the movie Girl with the Pearl Earring about Vermeer where he asks her what color the clouds are and she first says white then looks again. Clouds if you are a painter or a photographer are seldom white. But I also like clouds on a more scientific level ever since I first studied weather for a pilot's license. Pilots have to know what certain clouds could mean as regards safe flying or not. The last few weeks of tornadoes, wild fires, and volcanic eruptions have created a plethora of pictures of fantastic clouds and I have been collecting them in my computer files. This week's focus has been on pyrocumulus clouds. Per Wiki : A pyrocumulus , or literally fire cloud , is a dense cumuliform cloud associated with fire or volcanic activity. A pyrocumulus is similar dynamically in some ways to a firestorm, and the two phenomena may occur in conjunction wi...

It is Wednesday and I have yet to do my weekly That Was The Week That Was Blog. Frankly it has taken me to now to begin to process the week. It definitely reminded me of roller coasters I have known and loved. Friday, my birthday, was a high even though to get to Albuquerque I had to drive through the most awful layer of smoke from the Wallow Fire on the New Mexico/Arizona border. But I made it with my eyes burning and my throat raw. I set up my exhibition at High Desert Art and Frame and then went to my friend's house in the near by mountains to prepare for the reception that night. Fortunately the air there was a lot nicer. I was satisfied with my arrangement of paintings and photographs, liked the venue and the owner. My sister called to say she would not make it but other than that things went swimmingly in spite of the health alerts because of the smoke layer. Albuquerque is known for its thermal inversions because of the shape of the valley it lies in so the smoke did n...