Puffy Clouds

by Lisa Wooten

Title

Puffy Clouds

Artist

Lisa Wooten

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

Featured: Nature Landmarks Landscapes and Wildlife 7/23/2016

Lake Murray is a reservoir in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It is approximately 50,000 acres (200 km�) in size, and has roughly 500 miles (800 km) of shoreline. It was impounded in the late 1920s to provide hydroelectric power to the state of South Carolina. Lake Murray is fed by the Saluda River, which flows from upstate South Carolina near the North Carolina state line. The Saluda Dam (officially the Dreher Shoals Dam) was an engineering feat at the time of its construction. The dam, using the native red clay soil and bedrock, was the largest earthen dam in the world when it was completed in 1930. Lake Murray itself is named after the project's chief engineer, William S. Murray. The Saluda Dam is approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long and 220 feet (67 m) high. Lake Murray is 41 miles (66 km) long, and 14 miles (23 km) wide at its widest point. At the time when the lake was finished, it was the world's largest man-made reservoir.

Since its construction, Lake Murray has been the focal point of the region. Many different communities in four counties are all tied to the lake, and the local history has as much to do with the lake as the lake has to do with the local history. Considering Lake Murray now covers an area that was once populated, the story of what lies beneath its surface is the story of Lake Murray itself.

In addition to serving as a source of hydroelectric power for the region, the lake has become a recreational attraction, with fishing and boating being popular activities. Also, Dreher Island State Recreation Area, located in the Western part of the lake, provides multiple activities�all focused on the lake. In meteorology, a cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water or various chemicals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body.[1] These suspended particles are also known as aerosols and are studied in the cloud physics branch of meteorology.

Terrestrial cloud formation is the result of air in any of the lower three principal layers of Earth's atmosphere (collectively known as the homosphere) becoming saturated due to either or both of two processes: cooling of the air, and adding water vapor. With sufficient saturation in the troposphere, precipitation will fall to the surface; an exception is virga, which evaporates before reaching the surface. Clouds that form at very high altitudes in the stratosphere and mesosphere do not contain sufficient moisture to generate any outfall of droplets or crystals.

Clouds in the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to Earth's surface, have Latin names due to the universal adaptation of Luke Howard's nomenclature. It was introduced in December 1802 and became the basis of a modern international system that classifies these tropospheric aerosols into several physical forms, then cross-classifies them as low, middle and high-�tage according to cloud-base altitude range above Earth's surface. Clouds with significant vertical extent occupying more than one �tage are often considered a distinct group or sub-group.

One physical form shows free-convective upward growth into low or vertical cumuliform heaps. Other more layered types appear as non-convective stratiform sheets, and as limited-convective stratocumuliform rolls or ripples. Both these layered forms have low, middle, and high-�tage variants with the latter two identified respectively by the prefixes alto- and cirro-. Thin cirriform wisps are found only at high altitudes of the troposphere. In the case of clouds with vertical extent, prefixes are used whenever necessary to express variations or complexities in their physical structures. These include cumulo- for complex highly convective cumulonimbiform storm clouds, and nimbo- for thick stratiform layers with sufficient vertical depth to produce moderate to heavy precipitation. Wikipedia

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August 7th, 2015

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