Not a word you hear everyday – virga  – no it isn’t some new drug.

As I was out taking a drive early this morning I saw some unique cloud phenomenon being lit by the morning sun. I quickly pulled off the road and looked for a shot of this phenomenon. As I finished taking a couple pictures a farmer walked over to see what I was up to. As we began to talk, he quickly explained that what I was looking at was “virga”, rain the evaporates before hitting the ground. He explained beyond that going into the low and high pressure centers that were moving in and out respectively – he anticipated less than 0.1 inches of rain. This farmer knew his weather.

I had seen these streaks before preceding rains, but didn’t know it had a special name. Now I do and so do you – virga.

The blog images are HDR images. I choose to go with HDR because past experienced indicated that it really helps bring out cloud/sky detail. Notice that I also used a long lens to emphasize the sky. On the last image is used NikSoft’s Viveza to light up the lights.