Ticker for July 24, 2006

                
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Some Recipes Let You Substitute Ingredients

If you've been to any of OCS's public safety or K-12 education workshops
(and several hundred on this list have done just that!), then you know
that one of the ingredients for convective development is a source of
lift. Usually, in our state, when we're looking for lift, we're thinking
about boundaries: cold fronts, drylines, outflow, etc.

However, these aren't the only sources of lift. Mountains can spark a
thundercloud, and then there's fire. Yes, fire. You need a lot of energy,
but that's just what happened yesterday just southeast of Reno, Nevada.
Dr. Kelly Redmond of the Western Regional Climate Center snapped the
following pic of convective development across the Truckee Valley from
his location at the Desert Research Institute:



The brownish material beneath the cloud is smoke from forest fires, and
the developing convective plume is fueled in part by the associated heat.