Cumulonimbus Mamma? or Mammatus?
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Steve,
Mamma is the official name. This is classed as a cloud ‘supplementary feature’, and the convention is to name these with Latin nouns. Mamma means udder in Latin. This is the term used in the World Meteorological Organisation’s International Cloud Atlas.
There are sometimes more than one term used for cloud formations, and this is an example. I believe that mammatus means ‘udder-like’, but I’m not sure. It is a term left over from earlier incarnations of the International Cloud Atlas, before they rationalised the grammatical rules behind the choice of Latin words for the classifications. You can see here a sheet from the first Atlas in 1896, which originally has the word combined with Cumulus to form Mammato-cumulus:
We always try to stick with the current official classification terms, which suggests ‘mamma’ is the way to go. I hope that helps!
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