When airplanes attack

Here’s a video of a gravity wave moving through clouds.

Hey, I saw that today!

[going back and cleaning this up, sorry, working in reverse order] ~ charles the moderator

@briand
that’s not a gravity cloud – that’s a mexican wave cloud 😉

I’ve also seen the ‘hole punch’ cloud following a thunderstorm, and in an area without planes. So maybe other things can cause this effect?
Not sure flying saucers are a causal factor though 🙂

OOPS – I didn’t see Anthony’s of Highlander above.
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa!

I was always amazed growing up in the midwest seeing isolated patches of altocumulus or cirrocumulus with fall streakes below them. Often times the streaks would hit a strong layer of winds and shear them at right angles.

You will probably get a swag of comments from Australian and now increasingly a number of international glider pilots who are making Burketown a mecca to ride those roll clouds pictured above.
A similar but quite rare roll cloud system is also sometimes found across the South Australian Spencer and St Vincent Gulfs.
In about 1973, I was incredibly fortunate through nothing other than sheer unbridled good luck to be in a good performance glider and just airborne behind a glider tug when a single roll cloud similar to those pictured formed in an incredibly short time of only a few short minutes and only a few kilometres from our local Horsham airstrip in the central west of the state of Victoria in south eastern Australia.
What followed was one of the most incredible rides of my life.
Cruising at about 300 to 500 feet in the strong lift of the rising air along the great vertical face of the advancing roll cloud, at over 100 knots [ 115 mph + or 185 kph + ] for tens of kilometres in the glider and over dead flat terrain.
The sheer exhilaration of being able to pull up into vertical climbs of a thousand feet or more and then dipping and diving right down along the face of that roll cloud to a couple of hundred feet above the ground and then winding that Airspeed indicator right up again and around the dial as we hammered along the great vertical front face of that roll cloud as it eerily rolled across the wide flat wheatlands of western Victoria.
And all this without the roaring of engines, with nothing but the burbling of the wind noise of a high performance, high speed motor-less glider and with nothing but my flying skills to remain airborne.
And getting a shot of sheer exhilaration and spine tingling thrills out of something I had never seen before and have never seen again.
An exhilaration that is impossible to convey through words to those who do not fly and even to those who fly with engines.
The sheer exhilaration of experiencing an almost unique phenomena that so few will ever see let alone have the physical right up close experience of flying an actual roll cloud.
I have never seen another roll cloud in our region since that one although one of my fellow gliding club members a couple of years later, saw three of these roll clouds in succession roll over his property in the same region very early one morning.

I’ve always been impressed by these “spaceship” clouds (aka, lenticular clouds) that form over the Front Range of the Rockies on a regular basis.
http://www.tagbanger.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/lenticular-clouds.jpg

There was no commercial airline traffic for several days after 9/11 and of course, no contrails either. Was there any noticable change in the weather?