Is this a Roll Tide Omen about the coming NCAA national championship Game where LSU will Play the Crimson Tide of Alabama…Is Momma Nature Saying ‘ROLL TIDE!’

Pics from ‘Bama:

According to Chris Walcek , a meteorologist at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the State University of New York, Albany , fast-moving air high in the sky can drag the top of slow-moving, thick clouds underneath it in much the same way.

“In the pictures [of the Birmingham sky] there is probably a cold layer of air near the ground where the wind speed is probably low. That is why there is a cloud or fog in that layer,” Walcek told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. “Over this cloudy, cold, slow-moving layer is probably a warmer and faster-moving layer of air.”
Most of the time, the difference in wind speed and temperature between two layers of the atmosphere is small, and so the fast-moving air on top “simply slides smoothly over the slower-moving air like a hockey puck sliding along an ice surface,” Walcek said. At the other extreme, if the wind-speed difference is too large, the interface between the two layers breaks down into random turbulence.

Kelvin-Helmholtz waves form when the difference in the temperature and wind speed of the two layers hits a sweet spot. “What [these pictures] show is air between these two atmospheric layers that is just very close to that threshold for turbulence, and mixing to mix the two layers together,” he said

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Climate, College Football, Headlines, meteorology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.