On A Cloud

Arc de Triomphe So, I’m driving home from town late one aftenoon and, as usual, daydreaming with my head and thoughts in the clouds. It’s a good thing I don’t text and drive; this kind of multi-tasking enough already. Then, looming large ahead of me is the unraveling of this voluptuous skyscape across the western way. I really wanted to photograph it from The Mount but I was15km away, so across country I go, darting into a backroad that I’ve never (trespassed) before, under ugly powerlines I want to avoid, and stopping, triumphant.

Thanks to Sandy Jarman, this is what his Uncle Tim told me about this cloud: “Featuring a broken layer of stratocumulus clouds, they form initially as small cumulus, where individual ‘thermals’ rise until they cool sufficiently for some of their water vapour to condense out as tiny water droplets, creating the cloud. But, on many occasions, they encounter a stable layer of air which inhibits further rise, and the individual clouds then spread out laterally and link up to form a layer; hence ‘stratocumulus’, where ‘strato’ is a prefix meaning layered. A strongly arched structure is featured in the cloud, possibly caused by the influence of local hills”.

Dr Tim Gibson