Lenticular, inflow, spaceship or swamp gas?

[B Ozanne]

I'm sure several of you saw these interesting clouds on the May 7th cell just north of Turkey, TX. What do you think is the best classification for them?

http://www.easternlight.net/photos/texa0009.jpg

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Where was this feature relative to the rain? For me, the smooth and symmetric appearance would tell me it's some sort of wave atop a stable (rain-cooled?) boundary layer (kind of like HCRs, but this one acting more like a local gravity wave than an HCR). The small size it interesting though.

 

[B Ozanne]

Its hard to tell in the photo but there is an identical cloud just to the right (north) of the main cloud. It could be sitting over a cold pool, this storm hadn't produced any rain yet, but it could have put down a cold layer.

I think the Caprock came into play here as this cloud was sitting just east of it.

I know there had to be at least 50 other chasers who saw these clouds that evening.

 

[Shane Adams]

They looked like a beaver tail in appearance and placement, but they were moving away from the "storm". I've seen them lots of times, and they always mean a bust. I'm not very knowledgable about cloud types, so I'll not chance a guess.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Originally posted by Shane Adams
They looked like a beaver tail in appearance and placement, but they were moving away from the \"storm\". I've seen them lots of times, and they always mean a bust. I'm not very knowledgable about cloud types, so I'll not chance a guess.

Yeah, that makes me think it's some sort of gravity wave or other type of wave atop a more stable near-surface layer. This makes sense if it does indeed move away from the storm, as the perturbation would likely have been caused by the storm itself (imagine dropping a rock into water). Additionally, "always mean a bust" makes me believe this is stability-related (i.e. capping, etc), which would make sense since the wave feature would likely occur at a strong density boundary, such as what we have with cold air (dense) underlays hot air (not so dense), as in the case of a stable (capped) boundary layer. Given a storm, this may just mean that the cold pool is advancing to provide a stable layer, not necessarily that the mesoscale "cap" is strong, given that the size of the cloud is not particularly large (which makes me think storm-scale feature, not mesoscale or larger feature). Just a hypothesis.

 

[Blake Michaleski]

Looks like it is associated with the shallow lifting from the developing FFD outflow. You could probably call it a roll cloud. With time ive seen these transition into a beaver tail if it doesnt run out from the storm.

I wasnt there on this particular storm but that's my guess.