2-14(1967) FROM RAINDROPS TO VOLCANO'S, BLANCHARD

Romance Quarterly, 2021

Since antiquity, philosophers and poets have understood clouds to be principles of generation and procreation. They can turn, Aristophanes tells us, “into anything they want.” They are bound up with the act of begetting and giving birth, of bringing into being the new – hollow vessels, as Seneca would later put it, with solid walls. And yet the creative force of clouds is a strange, even counterintuitive, one: what they generate and bring forth is often evanescent, incorporeal, and unsubstantial. In this essay, we explore a poetics of clouds as a site of tension between the empty and the procreative, the material and the immaterial, the perceptible and the imperceptible. Clouds, we suggest, are instances of conveyance whose power of mediation gives shape to the unsayable, the unrepresentable, and the apparently unknowable. Their meteorological trickery draws our attention to the infinity of the cosmos by obscuring it. Their rhetorical obfuscations – what medieval tradition called the integumentum – draw us into their truths by turning us seductively away from them. Expressions of both cosmological and poetic becoming, clouds are therefore inseparable from epistemological and aesthetic considerations of the ways meaning and knowledge are at once hidden and revealed.

Physical Review E, 2002

We demonstrate how, from the point of view of energy flow through an open system, rain is analogous to many other relaxational processes in nature such as earthquakes. By identifying rain events as the basic entities of the phenomenon, we show that the number density of rain events ...

Weather Matters, 2021

Unpublished draft: English version made by myself of “Aristóteles y la lluvia una vez más”, Diánoia (UNAM), vol. LVI, num. 65 (Noviembre 2010) The text of Physics 2.8 has been recently interpreted so as to restore the reading that Aristotle holds an external, and even an anthropocentric, natural teleology. This reading has been defended by D. Furley, and especially by D. Sedley. In this paper I present several arguments against this interpretation of the text. Thus, I argue that Aristotle does not claim, in this chapter, that it rains for the sake of the growing of the crop, against an opinion which is currently somewhat extended among interpreters.

Journal of California and Great Basin …, 1993

I HERE are few things more awe-inspiring than thunder and lightning. The mighty roar and fiery light can fill the mind with images of the supernatural and bring forth both fear and reverence. For that reason, "celestial thunder" (i.e., the meteorological phenomenon) is recorded in the mythologies of various cultures (cf.

The formation of rainfall has been studied empirically and theoretically within the compass of physics accompanied by a meteorological background. The study shows the energy transformations from molecular potential energy at ground level after the possession of heat from the sun to kinetic energy at the atmosphere after evaporation and the retransformation from kinetic in the troposphere to potential energy at the clouds when it condenses after losing its temperature (completely) and simultaneously kinetic energy (since K.E=2/3 KT) and gains absolutely potential energy through height (mgh). Also it was observed that the clouds experience freefall like other heavenly bodies and are suspended in the atmosphere through weightlessness, but they break into rain when the weightlessness is overcome by avalanche and fall under gravity. This eventuates in rainfall, but it is observed that the temperatures of the water droplets are higher than that of the clouds due to friction between the water molecules and the air and the increase in temperature of the troposphere with decrease in height. The molecules then fall back to the earth surface, losing their kinetic energy after a few motions around and totally regain their molecular potential energy when they become stationary and the process may be repeated on and on. Introduction An important theory on rain formation put forward by a Swedish meteorologist Bergeron in 1933 and strongly supported by Findeisen in 1938 asserts that rainfall was, in effect, melted ice or snowflakes. The conflict with the theory lies in the fact that rain was also observed from clouds that did not extend up to freezing level. In some tropical countries like India and Nigeria a few observations have been made of rain from clouds, whose roofs were far below freezing levels [1]. Air comprises water vapour. The quantity of water in a giving mass of dry air is measured in grams of water per kilogram of dry air (g/kg). This is known as the mixing ratio. The quantity of moisture or water vapour in air is commonly called its relative humidity. Relative humidity is the percentage of the total water vapour the air can absorb at a particular temperature air. How much water vapour a measure of air can contain before it becomes saturated and transforms into a cloud is dependent upon its temperature [2]. Cooler air can hold lesser water vapour than warmer air before becoming saturated. Hence, one method to saturate a measure of air fast is to cool it [2]. Dew point is the temperature to which a measure of air must be cooled in order to become saturated. The various means by which water vapour is added to the air are: daytime heating eventuating in evaporation of water from the surface of oceans and seas, smaller water bodies or wet lands; wind convergence into areas of upward motion; precipitation or virga falling from above; transpiration from plants; lifting air over mountains and cool or dry air moving over warmer water [2]. Water molecules start to condense on condensation nuclei such as ice, dust and salt in other to form clouds. Clouds are a group of visible tiny water and ice particles

The two words 'meteor' (shooting star) and 'Meteorology' (the study of weather and climate) are both derived from the Greek adjective 'meteoros', meaning lofty. Because rain and shooting stars were both to be observed descending from the heavens, many people in centuries past believed that there was an association between them. However, a hundred years ago few would have expected that scientists would eventually wonder whether in fact there was not a relationship between meteors and precipitation, but in a manner very different from anything the Ancients could have imagined. To elucidate, we must firstly take a look at the process by which clouds produce rain.

Clouds can be seen as border-posts separating two distinct domains of reality or as self-generating significant shapes. Two radically different forms of dealing with the phenomenon can be deduced from this. On the one hand, there is the logic of the veil, of covering and uncovering. One can plunge into the mist or emerge from a sea of fog. In this specific case, clouds do not play the predominant role, but point to something more essential hiding behind them. This conception is mostly associated with stratus formations, with altostratus, cirrostratus and stratocumulus. On the other hand, there is the logic of projection and emergence. One can discover shapes in shapelessness, structures in the transitory and fleeting; and one can witness the surfacing of meaningful figures from amorphous masses of clouds. In this second conceptionmostly connected with the bizarre outlines and numerous protuberances of the cumulus, altocumulus and stormy cumulonimbus -clouds are swarms, collectives without a center, developing according to an autopoietic principle. and the atoms swirling around in it, the invisible, homogeneous, impenetrable, smallest components of the world. Thanks to a process of agglomeration and concentration first distinct elements and then reality itself emerge from an aimless and meaningless game. This subliminal, invisible world is the presupposition of all life. Finished things appear only in a second moment, surfacing from an initial teeming cluster of circling elementary particles. The cosmos and the body are composed of mixed tissue: they possess a permeable structure, are fluid and porous, soft and elastic. From the initial general mixture emerge individual shapes that all share the same cloudlike origin and ending. In Lucretius' work individuality is the temporary interruption of a continuous stream of atomic textures -a thought that reappears in Wolfgang von Goethe's work. Although Lucretius mentions the existence of atomic agglomerations held together by small interlocked hooks -and this holds also true for clouds -his analyses is clearly dominated by the fluid element.

Barbara Baert Looking into the Rain Humankind has a special relationship with rain. The sensory experience of water falling from the heavens evokes feelings ranging from fear to gratitude and has inspired many works of art. Using unique and expertly developed art-historical case studies-from prehistoric cave paintings up to photography and cinema-this book casts new light on a theme that is both ecological and iconological, both natural and cultural-historical. Barbara Baert's distinctive prose makes Looking Into the Rain. Magic-Moisture-Medium a profound reading experience, particularly at a moment when disruptions of the harmony among humans, animals, and nature affect all of us and the entire planet.

1993

This paper examines thunder, and its association with native Californian rain-making traditions. Although the discussion considers all of native California, it is focused primarily on the northern part of the state. Two related hypotheses are advanced herein. First, it is proposed that native Californian rain-makers accomplished their tasks by ritually creating one or more aspects of the storm (i.e., thunder, cloud, wind, or rain). Second, it is proposed that some pitted boulders represent percussive implements used by shamans to achieve altered states of consciousness, a condition necessitated by their rain-making activities. The ethnographic and archaeological data leading to these hypotheses suggest the Western Rain-Making Process described in this paper.