Big Clouds

Holly and I saw this cloud over the mountains today. The mountain is a mile higher than Albuquerque, so you can kinda gauge how high the cloud is.


Here's a clearer view also near Sandia High (Candelaria and Pennsylvania, in northeast Albuquerque). The top of the mountain is two miles above sea level. Look how much higher the clouds go!


The third photo is from inside our house, ten minutes or so later. I posted another photo of the Sandia Mountains out that window here. I couldn't use that angle for these, though, because the clouds were cut off halfway up, so I had to sit down low and aim up to get the tops of them. That's the window frame up in the corner of the photo.

Those are some big clouds. Thunderheads.

We've had out-of-state coastal-resident visitors recently and I was trying to describe how big those clouds get and how distinct they are from the sky. They don't kind of trail out at the edges. Sometimes there will be just one single one, and it will rain out the bottom on a spot not much bigger than it is.

Sometimes the rain doesn't reach the ground, but evaporates partway down. I'll try to get photos of that. It's called verga, the rain you can see that doesn't reach the ground. That only happens on very dry days, though, and today is downright muggy. 68% humidity.

The rain is always cold here. I was surprised when I felt warm rain, for the first time as an adult, in Pennsylvania. I thought all rain was cold.