Stunning Shelf Cloud Captured In Dorset (bbc.com) 38
UnresolvedExternal shares a report from the BBC: A video showing a shelf cloud forming, ahead of a thunderstorm, has been captured in Dorset. The dramatic footage was filmed by Steve Coggins in Portland on Monday evening before a thunderstorm hit the south coast.
BBC South weather presenter Alexis Green said: "It's shelf cloud -- a type of arcus cloud. They form on the leading edge of thunderstorms. Cool, sinking air from a storm cloud's downdraught spreads out across the land surface, with the leading edge called a gust front. This outflow cuts under warm air being drawn into the storm's updraft. As the lower and cooler air lifts the warm moist air, its water condenses, creating the shelf cloud."
BBC South weather presenter Alexis Green said: "It's shelf cloud -- a type of arcus cloud. They form on the leading edge of thunderstorms. Cool, sinking air from a storm cloud's downdraught spreads out across the land surface, with the leading edge called a gust front. This outflow cuts under warm air being drawn into the storm's updraft. As the lower and cooler air lifts the warm moist air, its water condenses, creating the shelf cloud."
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You're a big fan of mammatus clouds, no doubt.
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News? (Score:2)
So this may be news to the BBC UK, but these kinds of clouds happen all the time around the world. I guess the news here is that it happened outside of the tropical storm regions of the world?
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess the news here ...
Maybe they just couldn't resist posting a shelf-y ... :-)
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
This is cirrus news for nerds!
Apologies if this joke mist.
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This is cirrus news for nerds!
Damn, wish I'd thought of that. [*golf clap*]
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Re: News? (Score:3)
The weather here is usually pretty stable, rain, clouds, drizzle, maybe a sunny day for a bit in the summer. This summer has been drought conditions for most of the southern 1/2 of the country and now It's Sept. and we are having thunderstorms through the whole country right now... thunderstorms are a little rare here, but in Sept it's very rare.
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Congratulations sir - you just won the Internet for the day!
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They're not as rare as you think in september in the UK. Remember August is the hottest month in the UK due to atlantic sea temps taking a long time to catch up so september is climatically more or less the equivalent of July. Now if we were getting these in december or january that would be wierd.
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The real news is that someone was so heartless as to capture and detain a cloud. Clouds practically epitomize freedom and being unconstrained, so for somebody to lock one up is cruel not only to the cloud, but to all the observers who witnessed the capture. Oh the times, oh the morels! /is "RTFS" some new filesystem?
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Note to self: This commenting system interprets the presence of a single forward slash in a comment as evidence that the commenter must have manually inserted paragraph breaks where intended.
/yes, welcome to Slashdot
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For my part I understood from the headline that some hardware that was supposed to sit quietly on a shelf in a datacenter and churn out virtual environments, but instead was running amok and electrocuting people around Dorset, was finally apprehended.
I surely wish science and tech people would invent their own words instead of reusing existing ones.
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Yes it is very unusual over here - but it has been an extremely hot [metoffice.gov.uk] summer (for us anyway).
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I thought the 'news' was going to be a video of the shelf cloud forming, like the headline says. But, alas, it's just a video of the cloud already formed - could just as well have been a still.
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So this may be news to the BBC UK, but these kinds of clouds happen all the time around the world. I guess the news here is that it happened outside of the tropical storm regions of the world?
Clouds like this are a common thunderstorm feature in Australia. What's news is having one of these appear in the UK.
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You can see them almost every afternoon in the summer along the Florida panhandle coast.
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Err, what else do we talk about in England but the weather?
Portland (Score:2)
Yeah I thought "Oregon" too.
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Not Maine?
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Do either of them have a "south cost"? That's what triggered me to think and look further.
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LOL! where did that "a" go? "south coast" of course!
I blame this on Slashdot lack of Unicode support! :)
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Not yet, give the sea time to rise, jeesh.
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Re: Portland (Score:2)
Whenever I hear Portland mentioned, almost always it's the one in Oregon.
Portland, Maine seems to be a real nice place to live, and not even near the level of batshit craziness of Portland, Oregon. But of course, a nice quiet city isn't good for headlines.
I'm tired of all this talk about The Cloud (Score:2)
Aliens? (Score:2)
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I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens!!! (flails hands)
Actually it was Megan Markle trying out for a new role since her attempt at playing a Royal appears to be yet another Hollywood flop.
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I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens!!! (flails hands)
I must admit the first thing I thought of when I saw that picture was the French sci-fi La Derniere Vague [imdb.com] which featured a cloud eerily similar to that. I didn't see reports of any missing surfers though, so I think we're ok...