Last month, instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured these parallel lines of cloud streets over the Laptev Sea, north of Siberia, Russia. Their official name is Cumulus radiatus, for they would look from below as long rows of Cumulus clouds that seem to radiate from the distant horizon due to the effect of perspective as you look down their length.

The Laptev Sea is captured here in seasonal transition between summer’s melting ice and its refreezing in autumn. The clouds likely developed as a result of air flowing from the ice sheet in the east, to the right of the image, out over the warmer waters of the sea. The heat and moisture from the water would have caused rising thermals that generated clouds. The rising thermals were likely capped by a layer of warmer air up above, known as a temperature inversion, that caused them to roll back down. In the steady wind flow from east to west, the movement arranged itself into parallel cylinders of rotating air, producing cloud in the rising parts and clear bands in the sinking parts. In places, the Cumulus have joined into a more continuous layer beneath the temperature inversion, which would be known as Stratocumulus radiatus.