As usual, we saw some nice cloud formations as we left the grocery store Friday night. This was from the parking lot.

The crepuscular rays weren’t particularly noticeable as I looked at the clouds, but they showed up well in the photo. I like the way the cloud in the middle left is half illuminated and half in shadow.

When we drove home, there were more nice clouds. We managed to snap a few shots and got this one.

Again, the crepuscular rays were not really noticeable as we drove, but they showed up in the photos. They aren’t extremely strong, but they’re definitely there.

Another interesting (at least to me) feature of the clouds Friday afternoon and evening was the way they changed. Late in the afternoon, but well before sunset, there were growing cumulus clouds everywhere. They had flat bottoms and billowing tops.

The bottoms of the clouds are all at about the same altitude, which is where the air from lower altitudes reaches saturation as it rises because of solar heating. At that point, water vapor starts to condense and form clouds. Condensation adds heat to the air, and it continues to rise. As it rises, more water vapor condenses and more latent heat is released. Under different conditions, these clouds could have eventually developed into thunderstorms. But, alas, none did, at least around us.

As the evening progressed and the solar heating decreased, the energy that drove these clouds’ development dissipated and the clouds began to change. There just wasn’t enough energy available to drive any more development once the sun went down. The flat bottoms became ragged and the tops stopped billowing. Some became closer to stratus clouds and others remained more like cumulus clouds. Eventually they turned into what we saw on our way home.

This is a panorama from our new house site made just as we reached home.

Some of these clouds still have billowy tops, but there was not much going on by this time.

Tuesday evening Leah and I noticed some dramatic clouds in the sky in two different places. I saw a yellow glow from the rear of the house and went outside on the deck to look. Off to the left, which is roughly east, I saw a cloud that was illuminated by the setting sun. It showed some fair vertical development.

At the same time Leah was in the front. She called me out there and pointed to a cloud formation directly behind the house that I couldn’t see from the deck because of the trees. This was pretty much due south of us. It also showed some vertical development to the right in this image.

Here is a panorama I shot with our little Nikon S9700, which has a built-in panorama function.

It looked like there was some rain beneath the cloud to the east, but it was late enough that it was hard to tell. A little later, after the sun had set completely, I went out onto the deck and saw this.

This was not a severe thunderstorm, so the lightning strokes were infrequent. I edited the video to get several strokes into a short period.

This was what my phone’s weather radar app showed at the same time. The red pushpin is our location.

You can see that both cloud formations were producing rain, although not heavy rain.

You can see in the first two images that there was no anvil formation on either cloud, so they were not exceptionally high. I tried to do some rough calculations of the height of the cloud to the east, which was just south of downtown Rome. I had to estimate its distance and the elevation angle to the top of the cloud. I figure that the cloud top was somewhere between 14,000 and 19,000 feet. That sounds reasonable for the early development stages of a not-particularly severe thunderstorm.