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Hans, I cannot decide between strange beings and strange alphabet. Anyway, how did you get the black background?
Ramona, I do see these K-H wannabees too, but I don’t think they are it. I think the conditions are not quite right. It looks like you need to have laminar flow (no turbulence) in both the lower and upper layers moving at different speeds. This is more likely achieved in a case where there is a stable ground layer (like in a valley or in a calm air mass) with some soft winds above it. At higher altitudes (say where altocumulus clouds live), conditions can exist too because there is less turbulence there. But where these pop-up cumulus clouds are, there is quite a bit of turbulence. For one, there is a lot of convection, which is what generates these cumulus clouds. The convection interferes with the laminar flow.
To be clear, the K-H phenomenon is itself a type of turbulence, but it occurs only at the contact surface, In the upper and lower layers, the flow is laminar.
But don’t be discouraged, K-H do show up from time to time. Just keep looking and carry your camera.
I think I already posted this timelapse. I saw a cloud that looked like it was going into K-H. But it dissipated before K-H fully formed.
I’m not good with names either, but this one leaps to mind, how about “coming out of hiding”?
Ah the wires, the bane of cloud photographers. Or any photographers.
Very nice shots, Hans and Keelin and Hans again.
Hans, I cannot explain what you are showing in the last one, except for the birds. A contrail twisted into a spiral? And what is that glowing point, the sun or a dog?
In the meantime, Mr Crow finally paid me a visit. I am calling this “Morse or smoke signals”.
Looking at the last picture, I vote for cirrocumulus, though difficult to tell size from pictures. (Hans, did you do the finger width test? I guess not.) The milky stuff is ice crystals, resulting from the freezing of supercooled water droplets, so it could be virga, as epshultz says, if it were coming down, but looks more like it’s being blown away, the angle is not good for telling.
I did a quick google search for cirrocumulus and it came back with pictures that look like yours, Hans. Click … here.
I imagine it must have been fun to watch.
I would add floccus and undulatus to describe these clouds.
I agree with Hans, no lacunosus, but nice iridescence. And either cirrocumulus or altocumulus flocus.
Interestingly, I noticed that you can see something that looks like lacunosus clouds in … beer. Pour a beer with a nice head. When the head dissipates, there may be a little foam with holes in it. Sometimes, it may look like undulatus. Maybe we should start a “clouds in beer” thread. (Just kidding.)
Thanks Hans. It did not occur to me that the could in the first picture be a fallstreak hole, it looked like two separate clouds. About the second picture, I work on the 16th floor of the southernmost office building in Manhattan with occasional access to outside windows. Yes, the view is wide, but being inside creates other problems, like reflections on the window glass. There was a time when I could go on top of the building, 50 stories high. That was a fantastic view. But they closed that security gap.
Here is a shot I took today. I liked the dark grey clouds on the lighter grey background. (In the picture it looks a little blue, but I saw it as grey.) Only later I noticed the halo. It would have been nice to have that patch of light directly on the Statue of Liberty, but it was moving he wrong way. If I only had been there 10 minutes earlier :-)
Great pics, Michael, Keelin and Hans. Here is a little tropical excursion. When the (conventive) cloud is taller than it is wide, it must be a castelanus.
Hi Norm and welcome. I think in #5 you have several cumulus clouds at different stages. The atmosphere seems to be laden with moisture and unstable, so you there is rather rapid vertical development. Let’s look at those clouds that you can see almost in their entirety, there are a couple on the horizon and one in the foreground on the left. I don’t think they qualify for congestus, more like mediocris. In the background, a massive grey cloud. That could be a congestus, maybe a cumulonimbus. But you don’t see enough of it to tell. In fact, many times, the bigger cumulus clouds come with an entourage of lower clouds that often mask them. My humble opinion.
Hygge, you (or someone) posted the UK met clouds document before. I do find it useful. I like that it describes how clouds evolve. Aren’t clouds about constant change?
