Kelvin Helmholtz clouds (earthsky.org)
It looks like someone painted the sky with breaking ocean waves. They are called Kelvin Helmholzt clouds, aka as billow clouds or shear-gravity clouds.
Here’s a special kind of cloud known to scientists as a Kelvin Helmholtz cloud. They look like breaking ocean waves, with the rolling eddies seen at the top of the cloud layers usually evenly spaced and easily identifiable. Kelvin Helmholtz clouds are named for Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, who studied the physics of the instability that leads to this type of cloud formation.
How Kelvin Helmholtz clouds form. A Kelvin Helmholtz instability forms where there’s a velocity difference across the interface between two fluids: for example, wind blowing over water. You’ll often see the characteristic wave structure in this type of cloud when two different layers of air in our atmosphere are moving at different speeds. The upper layers of air are moving at higher speeds and will often scoop the top of the cloud layer into these wave-like rolling structures.
The clouds often form on windy days, when there’s a difference in densities of the air, for exmaple, during a temperature inversion.
These clouds are often good indicators of atmospheric instability and the presence of turbulence for aircraft.
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more: http://earthsky.org/constellations/kelvin-helmholzt-clouds
= new reply since forum marked as read
at least a few times a year over the mountains. I always wondered if they had a specific name... now I know!
Thanks.
