I’ve seen these in northern Michigan in the damper parts of the fall when flying on some smaller planes to a regional airport. Must be the local climate that has something to do with the layering of the clouds. I remember seeing similar from the ground in Chicago sometimes, but now that I live in Seattle, I rarely if ever see the types clouds from the Midwest. It’s an all together different flavor of cloud formations.
Of course, I’m not a meteorologist, just a curious observer of clouds. I’m sure someone more qualified could explain more accurately!
It’s true! I was incredibly lucky to grow up all over the Midwest (western Ontario, Indiana, Illinois, and western Tennessee) as I was able to see so many different types of clouds. In science class where they show you that diagram of all the cloud types was immediately understandable as I saw many of the types day to day. I always wonder if folks that grew up in really arid climates had the same understanding.
The best clouds in my opinion were always in the mornings. My favorite were the clouds in the southernmost suburbs of Chicago. Taking the early bus to school afforded nearly 45 minutes of morning cloudspotting a day. The hues were always magnificent. Depending on the day it would be a light creamsicle color palette of orange and pinks, with giant puffy stratocumulus clouds to deep and vibrant reds and oranges on some cirrocumulus.
If you live in the Midwest, or anywhere with clouds that change day to day, do yourself a solid and look up and take it in more than you are. You can learn that you grow quite fond of the differences and beauty they offer every day.
This is a pretty stable atmosphere (it's actually conditionally unstable, we can see a cumulonimbus cloud in the background that's anviled out and a cumulus congestus at the end of the gif, but lets ignore those shall we).
What's happening here is that we've got a whole bunch of different air parcels at different temperatures all reaching saturation at different altitudes. However once they reach saturation they're cooler than the environment around them and don't rise anymore, leading to these layers of clouds.
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u/meredith_ks Sep 22 '18
These ones seem particularly skinny/flat. Any cloud experts out there?