For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called Mammatus Clouds Over Olympic Valley. It is a picture of a different type of cloud, which were above Olympic Valley, California in August.
These clouds are different than normal clouds. Regular clouds are flat on the bottom, which is a result of the moist warm air rising and cooling to condense into water droplets at a set temperature. These actions typically correlate with a very specific height. Then, the water forms and the air becomes an opaque clouds. At other times and under certain conditions, however, clouds develop containing large droplets of water or ice that will fall into the clear air as they are evaporating. These types of cloud pockets do not occur in regular clear air, but rather in more turbulent air like during or near a thunderstorm. This can be seen at the top of an anvil cloud. An anvil cloud has a flat bottom, and contains small droplets of water and ice. It has an anvil shape from the upward air reaching a stable atmospheric layer. The pockets that form near thunderstorms result in the making of mammatus clouds, which can look really dramatic if the sun is hitting them from one side. Mammatus clouds, specifically, are pouch-like cloud structures and are a rarely seen type of cloud that looks as though it is sinking in air. These clouds are not harmful, and if anything, show that the brunt of the storm has passed. They extend from a cumolonimbus cloud, but can also be found under altocumulus, altostratus, stratocumulus, cirrus, and volcanic ash clouds. Mammatus clouds tend to clump together in groups, which vary from a couple clouds to over hundreds of kilometers of them being organized along a line, that are usually composed of either unequal or similar-sized lobes.
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