As a pilot I have seen the good and the bad side of Mother Nature as far as weather is concern. When it comes to clouds, pilots must know how to interpret look up towards the sky and literally be able read what Mother Nature has in store. There are various types of clouds that make our weather. My short article will help identify some of the some of the fierce's weather phenomena that Mother Nature can throw at you. After reading please like and leave a comment(s). Thanks! (-:
To many clouds are merely part of the backdrop in a typical day. I take notice when the sky is devoid of clouds or full of dark, menacing ones. But to the trained eye, all clouds betray a wealth of information about how the atmosphere is behaving and what the weather is likely to bring in the future. Broadly speaking, clouds help reveal how air and moisture are moving in the atmosphere. Or, in the words of Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the founder of the entirely real Cloud Appreciation Society, clouds can be "beacons that render the atmosphere's movements visible."
Sometimes these movements are violent. For example, springtime in the Great Plains brings epic clashes between summer and winter, giving rise to massive, long-lived thunderstorms known as supercells. These storms frighten and inspire, drawing thousands of storm chasers to the wheat fields of North Dakota, all the way south to the wind farm-dotted landscape of Texas.
To weather geeks like myself, clouds can be fascinating, even adrenaline-inducing, but they can also be boring. That's why I've put together a totally subjective, yet definitive, list of cloud rankings that shows some of the most interesting clouds and cloud formations, from cumulonimbus to arcus clouds.
1) Cumulonimbus
The clouds that comprise these storms, known as cumulonimbus, are in my view the most exciting that Mother Nature has to offer. They're by far the most interesting – and dangerous – cloud that you can see.
Supercells can best be thought of as your typical thunderstorm on performance enhancing drugs. Forming in the presence of wind shear, which is what happens when winds blow in different directions or speeds with height, supercells have a persistently rotating updraft. Inside these beasts of the sky, warm, moist air is sucked into these storms and catapulted aloft more than 10 miles above the Earth.
Think about that: As the cloud is billowing upward like a mushroom cloud, it is also rotating, which enhances its ability to spawn tornadoes, damaging winds, and large hail. The rotating updraft also gives these atmospheric beasts a longer lease on life compared to ordinary thunderstorms.
Supercells can turn the sky green, almost as if they're swallowing sunlight whole. They can masquerade as UFOs. They can also sprawl out, sending gusts of wind rippling along ahead of them and unfurling a "shelf cloud," that looks exactly as its name suggests.
At their worst, supercells can spawn tornadoes that devastate entire towns, reshaping lives forever in a fusillade of capricious fury.
From space. cumulonimbus clouds can resemble nuclear explosions, as they rise steeply into the upper atmosphere, often extending into the stratosphere and spreading out with tops that resemble anvils.
When viewed from space, thunderstorms look like explosions, clearly showing the strong updrafts powering the vertical growth of such cumulonimbus clouds.
From the ground, some supercells – known as low precipitation supercells – look like slowly rotating spaceships.
2) Mammatus
Mammatus clouds form on the underside of a cumulonimbus' anvil.
Mammatus clouds are rarely seen, but nothing can compare to a good display of these pouch-like clouds at sunset. These clouds are a secondary cloud, unlike cirrus, cumulus, and stratus, for example, but they rank highly on this list because they are so rare and otherworldly.
The American Meteorological Society defines them as "Hanging protuberances, like pouches, on the undersurface of a cloud." They are typically caused by areas of sinking air underneath a cloud.
Though this "supplementary cloud feature" is most commonly associated with severe thunderstorms, it also can occur with cirrus, altocumulus, and other cloud types.
Mammatus clouds dwarf a farm near Lamar, Mo. as the sun sets Sunday, May 22, 2011. The storm earlier produced a large tornado that moved through much of Joplin, Mo., killing 155 people.
3) Shelf Clouds
A shelf cloud occurs as rain-cooled air from a thunderstorm pushes ahead of the storm, forcing warm, moist air to rise, cool and condense on the front of the wedge.
Shelf clouds and gust fronts like this one can have elaborate, stacked shapes resembling a pile of pancakes.
Shelf clouds are some of the most menacing, yet largely harmless, accessory clouds out there. They tend to form at the front edge of a severe thunderstorm, as cooler, moist air from the storm is pushed ahead of it, colliding with a warmer, humid air mass out ahead of it, and forcing condensation to take place along an upwardly slanted slope.
Pictures of shelf clouds are often categorized on Twitter and Instagram as "shelfies," indicating that these clouds are quite common, but also impressive.
4) Wall Clouds
A rotating wall cloud (center).
A wall cloud forming on the lower left side of this thunderstorm.
Wall clouds form in supercell thunderstorms, and many give rise to tornadoes.
According to the American Meteorological Society's weather glossary, wall clouds are: "A local, often abrupt lowering from a cumulonimbus cloud base into a low-hanging accessory cloud, normally a kilometer or more in diameter."
"Wall clouds that exhibit significant rotation and vertical motions often precede tornado formation by a few minutes to an hour," the AMS definition states.
The clouds seen in the Plains in the spring and summer are some of the most awe-inspiring and rare atmospheric forms around. But they are far from the only striking clouds that the sky has to offer. Fortunately, most of the others are more benign.
Have you heard of the "Hole Punch Cloud?" What about the "Morning Glory?" Or perhaps you've heard of, but not yet seen, a lenticular? Some clouds, like the Morning Glory, are so rare and considered so magnificent that they can prompt a committed cloudspotter to cross continents and oceans to have a chance to spot them.
Rare clouds require the right conditions in order to occur. Some, like lenticulars and wave clouds, tend to only be seen in the lee of mountain ranges. Still more occur when the conditions are just right, with a layer of instability trapped between a stable layer of air above and below, paving the way for Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds to form.
5) Roll Clouds
A roll cloud.
A roll cloud.
Think of roll clouds as horizontal, tube shaped clouds that resemble small waves washing up on a sandy beach.
Such clouds, known by their technical name of arcus, are typically associated with a thunderstorm or a gust front, as cool air pushes out ahead of a shower or thunderstorm.
If you happen to see a roll cloud, you should consider yourself lucky. As the AMS Glossary states: "Roll clouds are relatively rare; they are completely detached from the convective storm's cloud base, thus differentiating them from the more familiar shelf clouds. Roll clouds appear to be rolling about a horizontal axis because of the shearing effects and horizontal vorticity provided by the differing air masses."
6) Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds
Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds.
Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds are a rare cloud formation that resembles ocean waves in the sky. When I spot them from the ground or airplane window I stare, sometimes for hours.
According to the U.K. Met Office, "The distinctive Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud occurs when there is a strong vertical shear between two air streams causing winds to blow faster at the upper level than at the lower levels."
They were named after two meteorologists who studied air flow: Hermann von Helmholtz and William Thomson Kelvin.
7) Lenticular Clouds
A lenticular cloud forming on a mountain peak.
You've probably seen lenticular clouds at some point in your life, but mistook it for a UFO, or possibly just didn't know what it was. Lenticular clouds typically form in the vicinity of mountains, as air is forced to move up and over the peaks, cooling and condensing as it does so.
The clouds can take on a smooth or stacked appearance, like an atmospheric pancake, and remain in place for hours on end. They can also have sharper edges, and be fleeting – here one minute, gone the next.
Glider pilots look for lenticular clouds since they often indicate an area of rising air.
8) Asperitas
An asperitas cloud, a type that was newly recognized by the World Meteorological Organization following lobbying from cloud enthusiasts.
Asperitas clouds are some of the newest clouds in the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) cloud atlas (no, not the novel). The best way to describe this cloud is to say this: It's when the sky looks like it's turning into the floor of a bouncy castle carnival ride, except in a not so fun way.
These clouds exhibit wave-like structures and are quite chaotic looking. The WMO likens them to clouds that resemble looking at "a roughened sea surface from below."
Members of the Cloud Appreciation Society documented instances of this cloud and mounted a lobbying campaign to get the cloud type included in the WMO's glossary, an effort which proved successful last year.
9) Hole-Punch or Fall Streak clouds
A hole punch cloud.
his type of cloud requires rare and specific conditions in order to form. It's characterized by a circular hole in a cloud made up of supercooled water droplets, and its technical name is "Cavum."
Typically, what happens is that wisps of cirrus clouds fall into a cloud layer below it, eroding a circular area that then appears cloud-free. Aircraft flying through thin layers of supercooled water droplet clouds (meaning that the water droplets in the cloud are below freezing but not ice crystals) can also carve out a cloud-free path in them, except these tend to be straight given a jetliner's flight path.
10) Altocumulus
Altostratus clouds.
Much like each of us, clouds have a dark side. Thunderstorms can spawn the most destructive weather phenomena on the planet. Tornadoes can clean well-built homes down to the concrete slabs of the basement, with winds of 300 miles per hour or greater.
In other words, the most exciting clouds in the sky – cumulonimbus – are also the most dangerous.
But doesn't this duality make you love them more?
A building cumulonimbus, or thunderstorm.
“The sky is of course the most chaotic and boundless of nature’s displays. It’s the reason why we love it, the sense of it being free and unboundable," he said. "Of course, humans like to contain things, we like to contain things in our minds especially…. That is what this classification system, this naming system is all about.”
“Clouds mock our ability to do that because they're in constant flux, a constant change.”
A Shelf Cloud/Thunderstorm
A shelf cloud containing a thunderstorm approaches a tornado-ravaged neighborhood in Joplin, Missouri, Monday, May 23, 2011.
A cross stands atop a church that was severely damaged by a tornado in Joplin, Missouri, as a severe storm passes overhead Monday, May 23, 2011.
12. Bonus: Most boring cloud award goes to... stratus!
A view of Loch Lomond from Duncryne hill, by Gartocharn on November 30, 2012 in Loch Lomond, Scotland.
Stratus clouds are uniform, thick and have little to no vertical growth. Have you ever been in fog? That's a stratus cloud. Ever gone outside on a rainy day to see a featureless, gray, sky – that's a version of stratus known as nimbostratus.
Compared to the billowing explosions of cumulonimbus clouds, or the roiling turbulence of asperitas, stratus clouds are more like the plain bread of the cloud world. (-:
I hope you have enjoyed my little article I have written for you. If so, please like and leave your comments below. Thanks! (-:
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