Sunset over New York

How was the evening sky at where you were the day before? I bet not as interesting as the sky over in New York. New Yorkers were treated to some fancy cloud formation known as mammatus clouds just after sunset. They look just like candy floss balls or cotton balls dangling from the sky. Or perhaps, udders? hehe... What do you think? Have you seen anything like it?








According to Wikipedia, They tend to form more often during warm months and over the midwest and eastern portions of the United States, and more infrequently over the west and southwest. Due to the intensely sheared environment in which mammatus form, aviators are strongly cautioned to avoid cumulonimbus with mammatus.

Mammatus may appear as smooth, ragged or lumpy lobes and may be opaque or semitransparent. Because mammatus occur as a grouping of lobes, the way they clump together can vary from an isolated cluster to a field of mamma that spread over hundreds of kilometers to being organized along a line, and may be composed of unequal or similarly-sized lobes. The individual mammatus lobe average diameters of 1–3 km and lengths on average of 0.5 km. A lobe can last an average of 10 minutes, but a whole cluster of mamma can range from 15 minutes to a few hours. They usually are composed of ice, but also can be a mixture of ice and liquid water or be composed of almost entirely liquid water.


Photo source: Gothamist.com