Weather-Related

A thunderstorm to our south lights up in the setting sun in a view off our porch.

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Nobody knows what causes these long, tubular clouds.  They are known as “Morning Glory Clouds” and appear nearly two miles up in the atmosphere and can stretch for hundreds of miles.  Although similar roll clouds have appeared all over the globe, the ones over Queensland, Australia occur every spring.

These long, horizontal, circulating tubes of air may form when flowing, moist, cooling air encounters an inversion layer, an atmospheric layer where air temperature atypically increases with height.  These tubes and the surrounding air can cause dangerous turbulence for airplanes.  Morning Glory clouds can reportedly achieve an airspeed of 60 kilometers per hour over a surface with little wind.

Photographer Mick Petroff shot these amazing Morning Glory clouds from his airplane near the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia.

Larger photo at NASA

A massive dust storm in China’s Taklimakan desert in 2007 circled the planet in just 13 days.  The dust cloud was 1.9 miles tall and 1,242 miles long.  When it reached the Pacific Ocean on its second time around the planet, the cloud descended and dropped most of its dust into the ocean.

“Asian dust is usually deposited near the Yellow Sea, around the Japan area, while Sahara dust ends up around the Atlantic Ocean and coast of Africa,” said Itsushi Uno of Kyushu University’s Research Institute for Applied Mechanics.  “But this study shows that China dust can be deposited into the (Pacific Ocean).  Dust clouds contain 5 per cent iron, that is important for the ocean.”

Researchers believe dust particles help form high-altitude cirrus clouds, though they don’t know whether these dust clouds warm or cool the earth.

Story at DailyMail