What the...

[Boerseun]

These long, crazy-looking clouds can grow to be 600 miles long and can move at up to 35 miles per hour, causing problems for aircraft even on windless days.

 

Known as Morning Glory clouds, they appear every fall over Burketown, Queensland, Australia, a remote town with fewer than 200 residents. A small number of pilots and tourists travel there each year in hopes of “cloud surfing” with the mysterious phenomenon.

 

Similar tubular shaped clouds called roll clouds appear in various places around the globe. But nobody has yet figured out what causes the Morning Glory clouds.

 

This shot was captured by photographer Mick Petroff from his plane near Australia’s Gulf of Carpenteria.

 

Science Forums - Boerseun's Album: Strangeness... - Picture

 

What the heck would cause that?

 

...and why doesn't the add picture thingy work? Nor the smiley adding thingamajig? What gives?

[pamela]

wow! that is way cool!

[Moontanman]

I have to admit i have never seen such a thing in real life but John Varley predicted such clouds in torus shaped orbiting habitats. I have only a small understanding of how clouds are formed but this is really wild.....

[freeztar]

We had another thread that dealt with these. I can't remember the title of it right now though.

 

IIRC, it has to do with boundary conditions between the sea and the land.

 

IOW, I have no freakin clue. :)

[jab2]

BS, how did you get to that. I stumbled on this phenomena with Stumble Upon just yesterday evening.

 

I must say I was really intrigued. I first thought, before reading the text, that the photo must be a fake.

 

I have not really read any further that the small bit of text with the photo I saw. How is the terrain around there? I was thinking of some land features that induce rolling eddies in the air mass which is then taken through a vertical sine wave type of distribution, taking some parts into and some parts out of the condensation zone.

 

But then my knowledge of weather is limited to the fact that it's wet when it rains. :)

[freeztar]

I found the thread I was thinking of:

 

http://hypography.com/forums/earth-science/2358-weather-watching-18.html

 

Check out post #175 by Hill. It seems that these morning glory clouds are a result of undular bores.

[jab2]

At least I had the rolling part correct. But then it's pretty obvious from the photo that some rolling is present.

The wiki page, Morning Glory cloud have some interesting info.

[Boerseun]

I haven't followed the above links, 'cause my connection is very dodgy today, for some reason.

 

I got the original in an email that was sent to me by a friend, and copied the intro as is. But it seems as if there's a cock-up with the whole story, 'cause:

...can grow to be 600 miles long and can move at up to 35 miles per hour, causing problems for aircraft even on windless days.

...how do you, as a self-respecting cloud, move at up to 35mph on a windless day?

 

I don't doubt these clouds' existence, but I do think that the intro I pasted here is pretty much worthless.

 

Once my connection is more stable, I'll follow the above links.

 

Promise.

[RCP/CRT/RRT]

Wierd...

[Turtle]

I haven't followed the above links, 'cause my connection is very dodgy today, for some reason.

 

I got the original in an email that was sent to me by a friend, and copied the intro as is. But it seems as if there's a cock-up with the whole story, 'cause:

 

...how do you, as a self-respecting cloud, move at up to 35mph on a windless day?

 

you do it as a soliton.

 

Soliton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In mathematics and physics, a soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave (a wave packet or pulse) that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. "Dispersive effects" refer to dispersion relations between the frequency and the speed of the waves. Solitons arise as the solutions of a widespread class of weakly nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations describing physical systems. The soliton phenomenon was first described by John Scott Russell (1808–1882) who observed a solitary wave in the Union Canal in Scotland. He reproduced the phenomenon in a wave tank and named it the "Wave of Translation". ...