Hot!

High pressure+downsloping winds=85 degrees and 12% relative humidity in Boulder! Quite the shift from the beginning of the week. It's great weather for drying clothes....

Happy Equinox! The exact moment is actually this afternoon.

Thunder-grapuel on Saturday

I was up at Beaver Reservior (just west of the Peak to Peak Highway) on Saturday afternoon. Not only did it snow (thanks to a passing cold front), but at one point we heard quite a bit of thunder and little styrofoam-like pellets started to come down--sort of a cross between snow and hail. Those little pellets are called graupel and they are much less common than snow or hail. More info here on how it forms. Very interesting stuff.

Albedo observations

I had a couple of real-life albedo moments on Saturday while painting a house in Dillon. Observation 1: Wet, white primer has a high albedo. The hot sun reflected right back onto us.
Observation 2: Black socks (no shoes) have a low albedo. My feet got really hot in the sun until I took off my socks.

California Fire Images

Check this out from NASA. The prevailing westerlies are bringing that smoke to Colorado.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/index.html

Informative article about scattering

I was trying to get a better handle on scattering, especially given the changes in our sky due to the smoke from the California fires and came across this.
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/corfidi/sunset/