Figure 1 – A classic example of a roll cloud. Photgraph from the US NOAA and in the public domain.

I posted recently about cloud photography, and the night that I wrote the post I saw a clip on the NBC Nightly News showing a so-called “roll cloud” spotted and filmed over Texas.  The Texas roll cloud is, I think, best viewed as a video.  But I have included as Figure 1 a from NOAA.  There is also a really impressive image from the United States National Weather Service showing a roll cloud forming in Sterling, VA, Figure 2.

Roll clouds are really rare.  They are a form of arcus cloud.  These are low forming horizontal clouds.  The other major form of Arcus Cloud is the shelf cloud.   While they appear to be horizontal tornados, they are, in fact, not related to tornadoes at all. They are caused by convective down draft at the leading edge of frontal systems.

So now I want to see and photograph my own.  And I am still waiting to see mammatus clouds as well.

Figure 2 – Roll cloud forming over Sterling, VA. From the US National Weather Service and in the public domain.

Over the last few months in the United States, we have been rather appalled, and most of us embarrassed, by the shoddy performance of our congress in dealing with real issues, and yes, in their failure to do their jobs.  I had the opportunity over these months to take three trips.  The first was to Washington, DC – the helpless Capital of us all – the true belly of the beast as it were.  The second, was to New York City – Capital of the Blue Zone – and the third to Houston, Texas –  Capital of the Red Zone.  In both cases, I was struck and really moved in the end by the hardworking immigrants to America, who are trying to build a future for their children here.  You just need to speak with them.  I had a long conversation with a New York City taxi driver, originally from Cuba, who told me about his children, who were going after advanced degrees in college, and about how he was working to build their futures.  I came away from all of this pretty optimistic.  We will be OK in the end, because, as it always has been, the future of the United States lies with its immigrants.

On a typical day at my job, I work with Indians, Iranians, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Chinese and Iranians.  We are the United Nations!  I am, in fact, a little concerned that I might insult some valued colleague by omitting them from this list. This kind of diversity is one of the great benefits of being a scientist.

But there is a very special class of immigrants – the refugees, the people who came here fleeing persecution, indeed often fleeing imminent death.  So imagine this – imagine that you are a refugee and you have just crossed over, just arrived in America.  You stand at the limina, the threshold of passage from an old to a new world.  What do you feel?  Is it terror, relief, elation, ambiguity?  Every one of these refuges has been at that point and felt those feelings.  I remember a friend in college who told me about her family’s escape from Ceausescu’s Romania.  Her father had been imprisoned and tortured.  Their escape was via Italy to the United States.  I have never forgotten her story.  I can still hear her soft quiet voice as I write about her. And there were other friends as well: one who told the harrowing story of her narrow escape from Idi Amin’s Uganda, fearing rape and murder; and another from a friend whose mother carried him on her back across a river to freedom.  These are the refugees and their stories are unique and personal.

So I’d like to draw your attention to Kerri MacDonald’s blog in the New York Times on November 12, 2013 entitled “Checking In to a New Life in America.”  This blog and a new exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center  features photographs from Gabriele Stabile’s book “Refugee Hotel.”  There is also a book “Refugee Hotel, Voice of Witness,” by Juliet Linderman and Stabile.  Mr. Stabile gained access through the International Organization for Migration and documented over several years the “first night” that many refugees to America spent in the United States.

There are many touching stories  here.  One is a 2009 photograph of Somali refugees who spent the night in the hotel hallway for fear they would be left behind on their trip to resettlement.  Then there is the image of Karen refugees being introduced to modern hotel plumbing.  You don’t see their faces, but true to great photography you can read their expressions, feel their wonderment. Another great example is Stabile photograph of a refugee brother and sister asleep and locked in an embrace – holding on to beloved familiarity, to the very bonds of place and sanity for dear life.  I usually only give at most three examples.  But I am totally haunted by the face of a little Bhutanese girl in Los Angeles from 2008 that tells the entire story.  This image says everything.

There is a dark graininess to Stabile’s images that creates a certain grittiness. Like the subjects, your eyes are strained by the darkness, trying to adjust, and looking for brightness. The mood is totally captured.  And I think most clearly the total exhaustion of these people on their first night is vividly portrayed.  It is as if, indeed it has to be, all of their strength has been required to bring themselves to the limina, to the threshold of a new world.

Whenever I fly, I always have my IPhone ready to catch an interesting cloud pattern and I have posted a couple of these here: storm clouds over the Chesapeake and the optical phenomenon called the glory.  On a recent trip into Houston, I was half expecting, somewhere, as we crossed from Massachusetts and the Northeast into the South, to see a sharp line with blue color on one side and red on the other.  It wasn’t that way at all – just everywhere majestic and beautiful.

Clouds and cloud patterns hold a very special appeal.  What if we could soar like birds?  And in another sense they speak of the changing, the ephemeral, and of something beautiful and nebulous  that is only loosely held to the Earth.

The message here is that I am very drawn to dramatic cloud pictures and, of course, the most dramatic of cloud pictures are the storms.  In turn, the most dramatic of storms are the super cells that can become tornadoes. 2013 was a devastating year for such storms in the United States, the most terrible being an EF5 storm in Moore, OK on May 20th.

There are people, who chase these storms for science and people who chase these storms to photograph them.  One of the best storm photographers is Mitch Dobrowner.  He has a recently released a book of storm images with Gretel Ehrlich.   Dobrowner’s images are humbling and awe inspiring.  There is an intense and frightening magnificence to these images – a sense of the omnipotent and the fragility of what we are.  I am really hard-pressed to say which of Dobrowner’s wonderful images are my favorites.  But I will give you two.  First, there is “Rope Out, Regan, ND, 2011.”  The second is one of his beautiful landscapes entitled “Shiprock Storm, Navajo Nation,New Mexico 2008.”

In great black and white photography there are always three things: first the light, second the vision, and third the technical ability to create a print with rich black, dramatic whites, and all the tonal range in between.  Dobrowner is truly a master.  And I have to tell you that when I am trying to recover from an intense work week there is nothing that reestablishes balance and bliss than great black and white photography.

It is often the case that you can find a photographer’s raison d’être on their websites in terms of a quote that they have placed in some prominent place.  Dobrowner quotes enivronmentalist, anarchist, and eco-terrorist Edward Abbey (1927-1989).

“Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.”

This seems a wonderful vision and mantra for all photographers – something to strive for and something that answers the question: is this worth photographing?

We ask why photographers like Dobrowner chase the moments and the light, even to the point of great personal risk.  I believe this answers the question and our vision is so enriched by it.

Here is one for all of you who had to pass the dreaded swim test at summer camp, high school, or college.  On Wednesday, November 6, the two new Sumatran tiger cubs at Washington, DC’s National Zoo were subjected to a swim test of their own before they would be allowed to roam the tiger enclosure.  The cubs, Bandar and Sukacita were not totally pleased with the outing, which will not be a surprise to anyone with a pet cat.  It is totally humiliating!  But it is important that should the little(?) felines find themselves accidentally in the drink, as it were, that they be able to both swim and drag themselves out of the enclosure’s moat.  Hmm, Bandar was kinda unceremoniously tossed in and in can be seen showing his extreme displeasure, in this perfectly caught photograph by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP, as in “do that to me again and I’ll eat your face-off!”