United States
No Photoshop: woman photographs crazy cloud formation in wave form – that’s what’s behind it
The unusual wave formation in the photo.
© Rachel Gordon
These photos amaze the Internet: In the USA, a woman photographed clouds – with a special feature: the clouds form almost perfect waves. A weather expert explains the phenomenon behind it.
It commemorates the “Great Wave off Kanagawa”, the famous work of art by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. As in the woodcut picture, huge waves pile up one after the other in Rachel Gordon’s photos and seem to want to swallow up the whole world. With one difference: In Rachel Gordon’s photos, the waves are not made of liquid water, but of clouds.
Even if the photos look too bizarre to be true at first glance, they are actually real. Gordon told the BBC that she was capturing the photos of the clouds over the crest of the Bighorn Mountains from the town of Sheridan: “It was something special and I knew right away I had to capture it.”
Kelvin-Helmholtz instability makes waves in waves
Weather expert Matt Taylor from the BBC provides an explanation for the unusual cloud formation: Wave-shaped clouds are known, as in this case the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. They form when a faster stream of air moves over the rising air on the ground.
Despite this scientific explanation, Taylor is also enthusiastic about the photos, calling them “one of the most impressive and epic examples of Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds” he has ever seen. Part of the beauty of Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, he says, is that they show the fluid state of the atmosphere.
These recordings are not only a special event for meteorologists, which one likes to look at in amazement. This is also proven by Rachel Gordon’s post on Facebook, which has now been liked several thousand times.
Sources: Facebook, BBC