Lenticular Clouds

Whitehall NY

See those clouds in the picture?  They are a sign that we yearn for all winter.   

You see, although we love the winter weather in Florida or the Bahamas, we really miss mountains.  When we lived near Burlington in the 1980s, I used to get an emotional high every morning when I saw the mountains while driving to work.   The best part was as I drove over the peak of the hill on Main Street.  From there I could see the lake below me, the Adirondack Mountains far to the West, and the Green Mountains back over my shoulder.

When we head south, as soon as we pass the George Washington Bridge the terrain becomes flat.  It stays monotonously flat all the way down to and including Key West.   The Calvert Cliffs in Virginia are the only sight resembling a hill that we we see from the water.

The clouds?   They are called lenticular clouds.  They are easy to spot because of their distinctive shape resembling a ground glass lens spherical on top and flat on the bottom. They form where the prevailing winds moves in up/down waves.  At the crest of the wave, air pressure gradients cause moisture to condense into a cloud that exactly marks the crest, and nothing around it.   Directly under or slightly upwind of every lenticular cloud is a mountain peak.  The mountains make the wind move up and down just like rocks on the bottom of shallow swift rivers can be spotted by standing waves.

When I learned to fly a glider in Vermont, I was warned to never go near a lenticular cloud.  It could be fatal.  A few years later I learned from an Argentinian friend that glider pilots in the Andes seek out lenticular clouds and head for them.  He said it was like being catapulted by a slingshot, and that he had reached altitudes of up to 30,000 feet that way.  I felt cheated.

Thus, lenticular clouds are markers of mountains that can be observed from several hundred miles away.  The picture above I took last June from down near Poughkeepsie, New York.  The clouds unmistakably mark the Berkshire or Green Mountains in northern Massachusetts or southern Vermont.