Clouds vanish during a solar eclipse
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
Annie Dillard said it best:
"I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.
Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it."
From https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/annie-di...
If you're in a relative near location to the path, leave everything you're doing and go see it, this is not just an astronomical event for astronomy fans, it's a social gathering to see the most amazing thing in your life.
Mostly you don’t see it because clouds change at just the right pace for us not to notice them changing.
He interviewed the guy who wrote the Solar Eclipse Timer app (https://www.solareclipsetimer.com) and also publishes a ton of info about eclipses in general (especially how to spot all the different interesting parts, and how to capture it on camera). That info is in a book here: https://solar-eclipse-timer.myshopify.com
No affiliation with either of them, just they have some of the most succinct and helpful info, especially for sharing with other people too (I hope to have my kids manage a few experiments during totality, assuming we don't get any clouds!).
I hope to have my kids manage a few experiments during totality
First time something had genuinely taken my breath away. Felt the enormity of space and my small place in the monumental universe.
The kids won't really notice much until pretty soon before totality, so it's nice to have some activity to occupy them :)
Especially things like pinhole viewers to see the partial eclipse image without glasses.
I have a friend down in Carbondale who's fortunate enough to be right in the middle of both eclipses. Was considering going there, but it'll be a larger family trip, and it was easier to load into a few hotel rooms in southern MO.
He is like “How It’s Made,” but for the more curious adult.
It's not like the sun fades slowly into darkness. It fades slowly until it half dark, and then just goes out in 1 second. Like if someone fades the light of the sun out in 1 second. It felt impossible. And you can see the light on the horizon, which looks amazing too. And when the sun comes back it comes back in a blinding explosion of light like you have never seen.
Nor am I, but each of the three total eclipses I've seen have been an overwhelming emotional experience—an experience I will never forget. Trying to explain one's experience of a total eclipse to others who've never experienced one always fails, one's lost for words, one stammers and the other party is somewhat bemused at one's antics and is little the wiser after one's explanation. The best photos don't suffice, there is no substitute, one just has to be there.
I am forever amazed at how the universe works, the fine-tuned physical constants, which if ever so slightly different we wouldn't exist, the Goldilocks position of our planet in the solar system with its oxygen and water and life support, and the fact that the moon exists without which—again—we wouldn't likely exist despite our planet's favorable position.
Now top all that off with the fact that the moon's diameter and its distance from earth is just is so precise that during a solar eclipse the moon just covers the sun—so precise that near totality we get to see the Baily's Beads and the diamond ring effect, and at totality we see the sun's corona. How did such 'precision' come about? It's truly amazing.
The coincidence of all this coming together to create the world in which we live simply overwhelms me whenever I think about it. It's so remarkable that no wonder so many believe it could never exist without a creator.
Assume that during an eclipse, the temperature will approach normal nighttime temperature, and stay there.
But on Earth it doesn't, for many reasons that are not all that obvious or intuitive.
Unmediated temperatures occur on the moon, and they swing from around 90 K at night to around 380 K during the day. Temperatures on the surface of the earth just aren't closely related to insolation. We've got a biosphere - and an atmosphere - for that.
We would, if there would be no thick atmosphere and greenhouse effect.
Think of it as blankets, you can feel the difference in a winter night with clouds, vs. a clear sky.
This describes how thermally driven cumulus clouds disappear.
However, I'd also say that another big effect is that the sun simply isn't there to illuminate the light cloud layer.
See Mauna Kea 1991: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RIMjx8feew
Yes, why it's the eclipse-disappearing type of cloud that disperses during an eclipse, don't you know? Clouds that don't disappear are of other types.
This is one of the axioms of the cloud type system which ensure its soundness.
Also, not all cumulus come from heated floor, it could be formed by different in temperatures and pressures in upper layers that pull hotter, stationary air from below, but there is no clear updraft from the ground up to be expected (usually common post-warm fronts or in troughs).
Before every one of these total eclipses the weather was either overcast or had been raining beforehand and there was much angst amongst us onlookers that we'd miss it. But we didn't, the clouds parted and each one was a magnificent and awe-inspiring spectacle.
Not only did the clouds part but it got noticeably cold.
Dunno if anyone else noticed this. Back in August 1999 in UK we were in a woodland clearing near the sea for the event. The sky was full of birds. When the sun dimmed, they all landed and fell silent. When the sun came back, the birds all start singing again like it was dawn. That rapid change of soundscape was both creepy and beautiful.
Not sure it was exactly and solely this phenomenon though. It was a mostly rainy, overcast day, pressumably featuring multiple types of clouds. It may have been combined with an element of pure chance for the lower cloud layers.
The air cools down so the warm moist air settles as it cools. As a result, clouds stop developing.
https://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall....
The idea that we'd eclipse the sun to control the climate is just one of the dumbest scifi nerd fantasies I've ever heard.
It's a good thing young idealists generally are never in positions of power to actually try their ideas.
Except we basically already did it, just unintentionally. A primary hypothesized reason for the literally-off-the-charts heat of the past 15 months or so is that regulations that cleaned up the amount of sunlight-reflecting aerosols in container ship fuel was having the effect of letting more sunlight reach Earth; the idea is that the aerosols had previously been limiting the amount of global warming that would have shown up earlier.
My point is that while geoengineering does sound pretty crazy at first, it feels less crazy once you realize we've already been doing geoengineering on a massive, global scale.
Obviously CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are what's driving climate change. But climate scientists have been surprised by the recent (like post-pandemic) big spike in heat, especially in the North Atlantic, and they hypothesize that low sulphur shipping rules that went into effect in 2020 reduced the global warming "masking effect" that these aerosols previously had: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
> Given that there will be a lagged response from the climate to the shift to low-sulphur marine fuel, it is reasonable to expect less than half of the warming resulting from the 2020 regulations to have materialised by 2023, likely only in the hundredths of a degree globally.
> This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.
It's a really fascinating phenomenon and I'm glad you shared it, but the researchers likely wouldn't stand by your phrasing and if you trace the stories and search results, you can see that it's really all just reporting about the same single bit of research from those researchers. So those pushing back on your own claims about it here have a point.
> Taking the high end of the range of estimates of radiative forcing could result in up to 0.18C additional warming by 2030 and 0.25C additional warming by 2050, though most studies have found lower forcing estimates than this.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
That’s nowhere near enough to back your previous claim. In fact, that entire article looks at decade-long scales.
I see this repeated a lot on HN, but it appears to be incorrect. It seems that climate scientists are aware of aerosols and can model them, but 2023 is still a baffling outlier.
> These include continued accumulation of greenhouse gases, the evolution of El Niña and La Niña, and the 11-year solar cycle. It also includes two new factors that emerged during the decade: the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano and the 2020 phase-out of sulphur in marine fuels. Both of these are estimated to have relatively modest effects at present – less than 0.05C each – but with large scientific uncertainties.
> Similarly, the phase-out of sulphur in marine fuels occurred in 2020. If it had a large climate impact, it would show up in 2021 and 2022 rather than suddenly affecting the record in 2023. While it definitely has had a climate impact – alongside the broader reduction in aerosol emissions over the past three decades – the timing suggests that its likely not the primary driver of 2023 extremes.
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/2023s-unexpected-and-unexp...
Also, the first is much too vague to pin down to anything precise: was switching from agriculture to factories a case of "our way of life going extinct" to those who lived through it? Was universal suffrage, universal education, and the introduction of state pensions? Was broadband?
Almost everyone who loses culture to climate change, is going to be those who already lost a lot of it to the European powers from around 1870 to 1914 (not that this makes it alright, especially as the actual harms that population will get in the absolute worst case scenario where such cultural loss occurs is the much worse fate of "being shot at by border guards when trying to migrate").
The only science that will be lost, will be in the form of secrets learned by governments that fall and which others didn't discover independently.
We still should try to stop, even slightly reverse, climate change; just not because of the arguments you're making.