Chaos in the clouds and the beauty of snowflakes
"The cloud is making these beautiful little works of art," says Kyle Brittain
All photos by Kyle Brittain, taken on October 23, 2020.
When snow blanketed Calgary last October, many cursed the cold, sudden, early shift to winter. Not Kyle Brittain.
“I make no apologies for sharing so many snowflake photos ... each of these flakes made me audibly gasp,” Brittain, the Calgary bureau chief for the Weather Network, posted on Twitter after the October snowfall.
Brittain’s stunning photos caught our eyes. It was refreshing to see someone share the beauty of winter at a time when so many were complaining about it.
His photos — which we’re sharing throughout this post — show a different side of the season. Brittain has been photographing snowflakes for about a year, and says those October flakes were the best snow crystals he’s seen.
We talked with Brittain about how and why he takes these photos, and learned a little about cloud microphysics along the way. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to see beauty in the snow this winter. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you photograph snowflakes?
I live in a high rise so I have a balcony rail, and when it snows they just readily land on there. And I go back and forth along the rail and just shoot snowflakes with this Olympus Tough point and shoot. I’ve got a little LED light ring so that it can illuminate them.
You have to catch them in those moments when they just hit the rail, because then they're not melting, they're pristine, especially the ones that are not clinging to other flakes. You learn a lot about cloud microphysics with observing these snowflakes. Sometimes there’s such a beautiful flake, but it's stuck to another one. And then if you try to separate the two, it wrecks it because they’re such delicate little crystals.
Are you able to get such photos every time it snows?
There's a specific set of conditions that are needed in the atmosphere to see this. Out of probably 10 snow days, you get maybe two or three where you can take pictures of the crystals.
First of all, it has to be cold at the surface so that they don't melt immediately on contact. But the main thing is that inside the cloud… if the temperature is -12 to -18 Celsius, specifically in that range, we get these snow crystals that are called dendrites, that's the classic snowflake.
They can just basically grow until they fall out of the cloud. What's amazing is you can see that not only are each individual snowflakes unique from the others, but even within the snowflakes themselves, there's slight variations on the individual branches. It just shows you how chaotic it is in the cloud. When you get in up close, you see how intricate and how beautiful such a simple thing — an ice crystal in a cloud — can be.
When you started photographing snowflakes, did you know much about cloud microphysics?
It kind of goes hand in hand. You see the intricacy of these snowflakes, you get amazed by it, and you're like how does that work, from a physics standpoint? You go and you do your research, and then you go back and take more photos. It's like a cool mini science experiment. The cloud is making these beautiful little works of art.
And they're just gently landing on your balcony or wherever, maybe your jacket sleeve, and it's just like, wow, that one's beautiful. That one's beautiful. Every one is different.
Actually seeing the intricacy of these flakes piqued my interest even more into how snowflakes form, the actual microphysics that are behind each of these crystals. They all start as one individual little clear hexagonal plate of ice, and then they just branch out from there. It's amazing.
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