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APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 4:05 am
by APOD Robot
Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan
Explanation: When do cloud bottoms appear like bubbles? Normally,
cloud bottoms are flat. This is because moist warm air that rises and cools will
condense into water droplets at a specific
temperature, which usually corresponds to a very specific height. As water
droplets grow, an opaque cloud forms. Under some conditions, however,
cloud pockets can develop that contain large droplets of water or
ice that fall into clear air as they evaporate. Such
pockets may occur in
turbulent air near a
thunderstorm. Resulting
mammatus clouds can appear especially
dramatic if
sunlit from the side. The
mammatus clouds
pictured here, lasting only a few minutes, were photographed over
Regina,
Saskatchewan,
Canada, just after a storm in 2012.
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 6:13 am
by VictorBorun
I am not happy with the referred explaination:
Why do some clouds have flat bottoms?
The flat bottom of the clouds marks the point at which the dew point and the air temperature are equal.
Sometime the air overhead is clear from clouds.
Sometime the clouds have flat bottoms.
Sometime the clouds rain and do not have any bottoms.
And from time to time after-storm clouds do have saggy bottoms.
Every time the clouds' bottoms visualize for us the surface of the dew point temperature in the air volume.
You can imagine temperature gradient as lines perpendicular to every point in the clouds' bottoms.
So: why from time to time after-storm air volume has temperature gradient lines that are not vertical, not even parallel one to another at 1 km distance?
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 12:32 pm
by orin stepanek
I must say that I like the cloud photos that APOD posts from time to
time. Relaxing view!
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:11 pm
by E Fish
Do you coordinate with the EPOD picture and switch from time to time? Their photo today is of the Milky Way over the Atacama Desert.
(But I also love mammatus clouds. I took a picture of some outside my house once, although they weren't so well-defined as these.)
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:33 pm
by neufer
- Hopefully, no children are reading this.
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 2:34 pm
by De58te
neufer wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:33 pm
- Hopefully, no children are reading this.
Why because Mamma Tus can only last a few minutes? In our big Sicilian family, my second cousin on the fathers side had a mamma named Mamma Toots. And boy when you got on the wrong side of Mamma Toots she would be a yelling and a complaining and tooting your horn for 20 to 30 minutes. You learned quite quickly not to get on the bad side of Mamma Toots!
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 3:46 pm
by neufer
De58te wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 2:34 pm
neufer wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:33 pm
- Hopefully, no children are reading this.
Why because Mamma Tus can only last a few minutes?
Mamma Tus is only half of the problem.
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 4:09 pm
by Sa Ji Tario
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 5:46 pm
by DonB312
Years ago, someone posted on this board what the word "mammatus"
means in latin. Since then, that's what comes to mind whenever someone mentions (or I see a picture of) this type of cloud.
Re: APOD: Mammatus Clouds over Saskatchewan (2021 Aug 11)
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 6:30 pm
by neufer
DonB312 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 5:46 pm
Years ago, someone posted on this board what the word "mammatus"
means in latin. Since then, that's what comes to mind whenever someone mentions (or I see a picture of) this type of cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal wrote:
<<Mammals (from Latin mamma, 'breast') are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia , and characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or hair, and
three middle ear bones. These characteristics distinguish them from reptiles and birds, from which they diverged in the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. Around 6,400 extant species of mammals have been described. The largest orders are the rodents, bats and Eulipotyphla (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and others). The next three are the Primates (including humans, apes, monkeys, and others), the Artiodactyla (cetaceans and even-toed ungulates), and the Carnivora (cats, dogs, seals, and others). The earliest mammals were likely nocturnal insectivores. This suggests a plausible source of evolutionary pressure: with these small bones in the middle ear, a mammal has extended its range of hearing for higher-pitched sounds which would improve the detection of insects in the dark.>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammatus_cloud#Hypothesized_formation_mechanisms wrote:
<<The existence of many different types of mammatus clouds, each with distinct properties and occurring in distinct environments, has given rise to multiple hypotheses on their formation, which are also relevant to other cloud forms. One environmental trend is shared by all of the formation mechanisms hypothesized for mammatus clouds: sharp gradients in temperature, moisture and momentum (wind shear) across the anvil cloud/sub-cloud air boundary, which strongly influence interactions therein.
The plenitude of [at least 10 different] proposed formation mechanisms shows, if nothing else, that the mammatus cloud is generally poorly understood.>>
