Wave Clouds Photo from Ohio
With all the weather going on today, I've forgotten what this blog's mission is, and that's to see what's going on across AccuWeather and the weather enthusiast world. Feel free to email me any interesting photos that you might snap.
Eric, a WeatherMatrix Member from Ohio, sent me a couple of pictures of wave clouds he snapped last night in Ohio, one of which is shown below. Wave clouds are simply disturbances in the atmosphere which cause ripples in a stable layer of air. Where the air rises and warms, you see the clouds form, but as the air sinks again, it dries and causes the clear areas in between. Wave clouds are most often caused by thunderstorms punching through the troposphere, or by mountains. It also looks like Eric got a jet trail shadow in the right hand side of the picture, created from a jet trail above the cloud layer.
An extreme example of wave clouds are lenticular clouds, which are usually caused by mountains, as air rises up over the mountain and reaches the saturation point. Unlike some wave clouds, lenticular clouds generally stay in the same place (the air continues to move through them). Interestingly enough, the background of the image at the top of this page is a photo I took of lenticular clouds caused by Mount Mitchell (highest point east of the Mississippi) in North Carolina back in 1992 when I was in school for meteorology at the University of North Carolina - Asheville.
