Unique Sierra Wave cloud sighted over Reno, NV
From my friend Mike Alger at KTVN-TV Reno, who writes:
I’ve been on the air doing weather for KTVN-TV for over a quarter of a century, as you might expect (and to channel Anthony), people send me things. Especially pictures of the clouds. And some of them are quite good. But the one Jeff Houk sent me Sunday morning might be the coolest ever. I’ve seen some very nice Standing Lenticular clouds (we call them Sierra Wave clouds locally) before, and the colors make this one pretty spectacular in its own right. But that perfectly carved out hole in its middle was something that I’ve never seen before.
Full sized: https://wxmanreno.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/spaceship-lenticular.jpg
I thought it might be fun for WUWT readers to give their own theories on what is causing it. I have a pretty good idea, and so as to not give it away, after you post you theory below, you can link to my explanation found on my weather blog at mikealger.net. Here’s a direct link to the relevant posting: (http://mikealger.net/2015/03/18/explaining-the-hole-in-the-cloud/)
Enjoy!
Mike Alger
Chief Meteorologist
KTVN-TV
Reno, NV
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It’s the cloaking device of the Federation Starship Enterprise. The best they can do is to make the ship look like a cloud. Not so effective in space …
Not Star Trek fantasy, but real aliens disguising their saucer.
We’re doomed.
Or saved?
They want to eat our brains!
Save the planet!
Eat our brains!
Save the planet!
Eat our brains!
Both?
“It’s a cook book!”
ack ack!…. ack ack ack!
@ur momisugly Ralph Kramden: “To Serve Man”
To serve Mann
The Treaty of Algernon prohibits Federation starships from using cloaking technology.
Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation………We have assumed control!
Nice reference Kenny (below).
Looks to me like that cloud in Ghostbusters. Prepare for Gozer the Destructor!
Well there is the well documented hole punch cloud at O’hare on Nov. 6. 2006. Of course the normal response is to just dismiss all of the witness evidence and assume it was some kind of unexplained phenomenon unknown at present (gee I sure wouldn’t want want any of those highly experiences pilots or ground personnel on a jury of mine/sarc).
An object had hovered over the O’Hare airport concourse at United Airlines gate C17. It could not be identified by witnesses as any known craft. One United Airlines officer who observed it from almost directly below for approximately five minutes described it as “a dirty-aluminum color, very stable, and without any optical distortions near it” . . . it was “perfectly round and silent.” The object, what ever it was, appeared to have punched a “sharp-edged hole” through cloud cover when it left. There was an almost perfect cut-out (of clear air) in the cloud layer where the craft had been. It is estimated the hole remained visible for approximately five to ten minutes.
http://www.cohenufo.org/ohare2006.htm
http://www.narcap.org/reports/TR10_Case_18a.pdf
And for 5 minutes not a single person was able to take a decent picture of it?
You do realize how cranky TSA types can get when they catch folks taking unauthorized photos at an airport don’t you? Then again, even if someone did get a snap with their phone, the lenses in a phone are – ah – we’ll just say pushed to the limit of their quality. The images are stored as jpegs, so there is some data loss as the image is stored, and no RAW file is generated. Since the incident at O’Hare was in 2006, you can step back the image quality of phone images too “even worse.” So, the eyewitness descriptions are probably as good as anything you get from a phone camera and probably more detailed. And, because TSA is TSA, cameras are not well regarded in the secure areas and flight lines at major hubs.
Obviously, Co2 is causing some kind of warming and this time it makes a circle. Logically and not sarcastically.
Because of changes to the climate, caused in large part by human activity, cloud formations like this could become more common in the future. /futurecommentbytheipcc
could become more or less common… Fixed it for you
I stand corrected. Although you can’t go wrong making a pro-agw statement more weasley, or waffley.
Mike – There’s a small chance I’m wrong, but that sure looks like “The Mote in God’s Eye”….
Obscure reference of the day……. well done, Sir!
TB
Obscure? It was a best-seller and one of the top SF novels of all time.
But the photo is the Eye Storm. Watch out, Teela!
Umedvirk!
(If I remember the story and spelling correctly)
Terrific answer best of the day! (loved the story) We have Lenticular clouds often but the colors are beautiful ( my partner is taking pics of the screen!!) I also believe the hill just below is causing, it the one “hole” on the right does not show a hill below it (out of the pic) but maybe Mike can expand the shot. Again, great shot as they sometimes do not last long with that intensity of colors
Dang commas, should read: causing it , the one etc.
by Jerry Pournelle – read that long ago. Good sci-fi story.
Pedant Alert: The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
greymouser:
Neither accuracy nor thoroughness should be mistaken for pedantry, except in a dumbed-down world..
Tanj, although we get some gorgeous sunsets here, I’ve never seen something like that!
On the other hand, we don’t get very much snow, either – that’s a plus
But, on the griping hand, the scale isn’t quite right for the Mote.
s/griping/gripping/
‘Ware the Motie peril! (*Fyunch-click*)
Where do you think e-motie-cons came from?
did you type that with your gripping hand?
It’s cause by coal fired power plants at Lake Tahoe … sarc/
caused…
Twin vortices spun as a layer of air moves past a narrow peak off to the far left?
SR
I say this because there are twin oval clouds with holes in them, joined by a narrow band, in the right foreground. In the rear left there is another pair of lenticular wave clouds. Looks like air is flowing toward the camera from left rear, having flowed past a peak out of view to the far left.
SR
Stevan… The peaks probably contributed to the formation of the wave clouds (lenticulars), but I’m pretty sure they aren’t the cause of the hole in the center. Check my solution at mikealger.net.
That’s not a cloud, you fools, it’s a Vogon constructor ship. Looks like they’re about the start work on that inter-galactic expressway finally.
I’m going to grab my towel and get out if here.
Al Gore ate 3 too many pizzas, of course, and threw up during a ‘weather event’.
rocket launch?
It’s the Big O in CO2.
But there are two Os in CO2.
I think they may have found the hole in the ozone layer
Oh noes! The ozone hole is MOVING AROUND NOW!
[See next WUWT post about scary/bad news stories]
Thermals. There are two.
This ‘never been seen before’ hole in the cloud was caused by a massive radiative imbalance. This can only be due to the anthro, anthtopo, aanthropomorf, man-made emissions of carbon dioxide. It had, of course, been predicted by multi-ensemble, quantum adjusted, globally sensitive, organic, free-range, gluten free computer models, powered by the finest grants available. If more money can be provided for further research we might even be right.
since you insist the computer models are gluten free… then you are absolutely correct!
Not in the same league, but there was a pretty spectacular sunset over San Francisco last night (3/16). No color enhancement here. I usually only see such redness when there are wildfires in the state. Something in the air, ha ha ….. yep, carbon something or other.
http://i60.tinypic.com/1qld14.jpg
Damn. I gave my coordinates away. I think I just heard a drone ….
Must be that darn coronal mass ejection.
Heat rising from one of the uber solar plants?
Antony,
That cloud doesn’t look like the Sierra Wave lenticular clouds that I’ve seen over the Carson Valley. The patchy tendrils above (brightest yellow cloud bits in the photo), don’t look like they can exist in the smooth transverse winds of a wave lenticular cloud.
The photo looks like some convective cloud in an unusual thermocline.
“That’s not a standing lenticular. This is a standing lenticular Sierra Wave cloud”
http://www.pbase.com/jadazu/image/89158962/original
Just a hint…it is definitely lenticular, and not convective. Strong prefrontal winds perpendicular to the Sierra were already blowing at this time. It was not a convective environment.
I saw a very similar cloud over the eastern side of the Southern Coast Range in the San Joaquin Valley several years ago. I was on I-5 can could not pull over for a photo. The one I saw was not as clean cut as this one and it had small dependent vortices around the outer edge that look rather like tentacles. I thought at the time what a great H P Lovecraft reference it would have made.
That is a crop circle done by an elevation-challanged alien from Nirubi…. geez, do I have to explain everything around here!
It’s caused by electricity.
Obviously it’s Kevin’s missing heat, silly.
Missing in Nevada…who’da thunk?
Pretty smart though.
Who would look for extra heat in Nevada?
Makes it easier to blend in with the other heat, I guess.
It’s god’s anus.
Eugene WR Gallun
Sadly the image has been cropped so you can’t see the spindle formation out the side of the frame. This was pre-production set up for Interstellar Mythbusters to test the old proverb that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle”.
The eye isn’t fully formed yet, the proverb’s creators didn’t specify the material the needle should be made from and the camel launchers are also out of shot. Al Gore declined to participate in the other part of the proverb, so the myth is a hit.
It sounds as though it was pretty difficult for these camels to go throught he needle’s eye.
The proverb didn’t say it was impossible, just difficult.
Yep. They have to be pureed very thoroughly first.
A microscopic black hole entered the atmosphere and pierced this cloud. It has since migrated to the center of the earth, where it is proceeding to consume the earth ‘inside out’.
It is worse than we thought……
The above was a premise for a story by Greg Bear. The title escapes my memory right now.
Maybe you’re thinking about “The Hole Man” by Larry Niven.
Or “Hyperion” by Dan Simmons.
I did a search on Amazon and the novel is “The “Forge of God”. It was first published about 1989 or so. I read the original book in the early 90’s and thoroughly enjoyed it. Well worth reading again.
greymouser,
You win the ‘kewpie doll’ !
The Forge Of God was an excellent sci-fi tale!
Mac
It looks like the red spot on Jupiter. Seriously, I guess it was caused by winds being separated by a mt peak and one stream of wind going faster than the other causing a spiral wind pattern.
This is a cumulus lenticularis gone into the castellanus stage because of local latent heat causing extra lift to the above air. There is a hidden convection cell located above the centre of that cloud, and it roofs in the tropopause some kilometers above the centre of the cloud. The downdraughts cause the bulb below the cloud, which is probably a giant mammus-feature. Because the air below the cloud es dry, any precipitation from it either evaporates or is blown to somewhere else. The small, fluffy clouds surrounding the lenticularis are probably caused by the cool downdraugt of the convective cell.
You a climate scientist? 🙂
Sure, but that was the obvious answer.
How interesting. I actually see two “perfectly carved holes” as you call them. Any constructs like that on our globe are probably due to the Coriolis effect, somehow. Let os speculate on how such two “holes” can come about in clouds. It must have been in very calm conditions.
Andy… actually, the wind was really starting to howl…especially at the elevation of the clouds shown. Probably WSW at 80-100 mph up there.
Turn the photo upside-down …… and you got a “whirlpool”.
Once a convective cell rises into the air, it follows the prevailing wind. It “senses” no wind.
Does Mr. Houk offer any information about how this cloud developed over time? Maybe a series of pictures? It would be interesting to see what motion might be indicated within the cloud.
I once saw a toroidal cloud in front of the San Gabriel mountains, apparently over Azusa. It looked like a giant inner tube lying flat, and it was so compact that I thought at first it was a balloon. However closer observation revealed that it was spinning; imagine a long skinny tornado that somehow looped back on itself. I was riding a bike on top of Santa Fe dam at the time and I watched it for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, called it to the attention of a couple of passing hikers. Eventually my ‘inner tube’ had a blowout, with a big puff of cloud emerging from the west side, and the tube shrivelling to nothing all the way around, but maintaining its overall diameter. Been wondering ever since how it got started, whether something like that could start in more settled weather, well above the dew point so it would be invisible, but might cause Clear Air Turbulence.
Juan…I asked him if he saw it before he took the picture (I was interested if there was some virga below the hole before the picture was snapped.) He said he went outside, saw it and snapped three pictures, probably over the course of 15 minutes. They all looked the same with some slight variances in color. Here’s how they looked in order of appearance.
We get those downwind of Mt Rainier – you can watch them form and dissipate for hours while driving toward Seattle from Eastern Washington. I’ve always presumed them to be standing lenticulars embedded in a layer of stratus. The stacks in the background are more common. As a pilot I’ve been taught to avoid them but as a student of nature I’m always looking for them.
And Juan… That horizontal toroidal cloud you described was probably what we call a rotor cloud. Usually they are seen over the Owens Valley, and yes, you really don’t want to fly into them.
Very dangerous, you fly through first…
Generally those fairly rare, short lived, torodial spinning clouds are created by the fast rotating horizontal and usually very rough turbulent rotor systems found under most mountain lee wave systems.
The extraordinary mountain lee wave systems found east of the Andes over western Argentina don’t seem to have rotor systems laying under them or reasons still unknown.
The very high altitude “Perlan” pressurised glider project, it is hoped in 2016 if conditions are suitable will attempt to reach 90,000 feet altitude using height gained in the amazing Andes mountain’s lee wave systems to gain entry to the wave systems that extend up into the fast moving stratospheric Antarctic Polar Vortex winds over Patagonia in the far south of South America.
If they succeed it will be the highest sustained level flight, higher even that the SR 71’s record for level sustained flight of around 87,000 feet.
It seems that a good percentage of the world’s research meteorologists are also watching this project with great interest as it will be rare and unique platform to analyse the conditions at these altitudes.
The “Perlan” project glider will possibly be on display at Oshkosh later this year.
Flights by gliders approaching and in at least a couple of instances exceeding 3000 kms distance have been done over the last few years in the Andes wave systems . These flights are generally carried out at 30,000 to 40,000 feet altitude with straight line speeds exceeding 300 KPH ground speed and can last for some 10 hours or more.
Mountain Wave Project; http://www.mountain-wave-project.com/index-1.html
The Perlan Project; http://www.perlanproject.org/
And for numerous spectacular cloud formations
The Cloud Appreciation Society ; http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/
As for that apparent “hole” in the center of that rough looking lenticular.
My guess would be the overall wave is being triggered off a relatively low range by mild wind conditions at low level.
However there may be, even appears to be in the last photo just above, a higher narrow peak in that range of hills that is projecting into a much faster moving,higher in altitude wind flow and this is creating a very narrow intense fast moving lee wave off that sharp peak that is driving that apparent hole into the main lenticular.
Not at all unusual, in fact the norm to find surges and narrow regions of temporarily much faster lift ie; fast ing air in lee waves of say 400 feet per minute up through to a 1000 FPM up when flying gliders in those waves and thats in our very mild mountain wave conditions here in Australia let alone in the much more powerful Sierra wave and the Andes mountains wave systems.
This is clearly caused by energy from the Sun and Earths atmosphere with its water vapor?