Lenticular Clouds

• A PUZZLE — ANYONE HAVE AN EXPLANATION?

It is astonishing that the clouds here should exhibit such layering or internal lamination. I wonder what the inducers were or are?

— Patrick Michael Gunkel

Mystical looking clouds arent they 10+ on a wild cloud capture! Maybe the desert springs helped formed those! thanks for sharing

I've actually been to Beowawe. It was way back in 1968. I was a field geophysicist with Kennecott Exploration, Inc. at the time.

Great composition!

Lenticular clouds are produced by winds around mountains.

wow..i've never seen lenticular clouds..now I know why, we don't live near the mountains. Cool shot!

Dear "CitizenX":

Thank you for your terse response!

But both of us already knew THAT, or about that half of the puzzle, or of the characteristic TWO-DIMENSIONAL HALF of the MORPHOLOGICAL, or morphogenesis, problem.

There are even some uncertainties about what the FULL stationarity problem may be, because mountain landscapes can be quite complex and have several very interesting nonlinearities, both qua mountains and qua the range of peculiarities the clouds themselves can have, and then there are the complications introduced by the morphology and dynamics of the INVISIBLE part of the lenticularities (including cloud-like structure and phenomena in the purely marginal EXCESSES and marginal DEFICIENCIES of the moisture, for the whole area at a given moment or in a given radius or in a given process or amidst given nonlinearities of first, second, or higher order).

So let us also remember that, in theory and to some degree in fact, nonlinearities in this case can also be of higher than just first order.

But to return to a major — and more immediately, and conceivably even more fundamentally, interesting — point: The appearance, behavior, origin, anomalies, decay, and death, of lenticular clouds and their 'seeds' (as well as poorly understood weak-structure intertransformations), may in some instances, IN THEORY, be exquisitely sensitive to even TEXTURAL (e.g., macroscopic or microscopic roughness) aspects of mountains (both INDIVIDUALLY and as neighboring GROUPS or RANGES).

ALSO, and what in theory could be even more important, MINERALOGICAL peculiarities (e.g., in heat absorption, conduction, and release) need to considered as candidates for consideration here.

To sum the whole business up, frankly and tartly: The etiology of lenticular clouds remains to this day only fractionally understood and investigated. No doubt in part because the Powers That Be — especially the sources of funds, a-fortiori in the current pathologically profit-oriented (i.e., business-controlled) era — disdain virtually all those ESOTERIC problems which they themselves are embarrassingly incompetent to grasp.

• BUT NOW LET US put almost the whole of the above aside, AND TURN TO:

The problem that interested me in PARTICULAR, and which is rather more difficult to explain, is the NATURE and CAUSE of the THIRD-DIMENSIONAL, or VERTICALLY LAYERED, STRUCTURE of lenticular clouds. (As is so dramatically illustrated in the grand IMAGE we have been given to ponder here, where all three lenticular clouds re-illustrate the pile-of-pancakes phenomenon.)

Here I must confess that, at least for the moment, I am rather at a loss to explain it. Unless CYCLICAL formation (or restoration, or creation-and-destruction-and-recreation) is at work or at play here.

Might different lenticular clouds (sometimes?) have a discontinuous or cyclical tendency to shift part or all of themselves downstream to ANOTHER lenticular cloud, and therefore add to the latter ANOTHER LAYER?

Notice that in the one image we have been given, with its set of 3 lenticular clouds, there appear to be TWO 2-layer lenticular clouds, and ONE (much nearer) multi-layer lenticular cloud. The latter (seems!) to have FAR more layers than the farther pair. This might simply be an illusion due to the poorer resolution of the far pair.

Or per contra, it might be a reality, and perhaps telling us something of great importance. For example, LARGER mountain basins may promote or feed or be able to maintain more laminae than do SMALLER ones.

Getting these and other germane — even critical — questions about lenticular clouds answered ought to be all but effortless nowadays, and my own guess would be that it has already been done, with or without intent — via time-lapse cinematography.

For example, the latter should tell us whether the cloud layers form and move from TOP to BOTTOM, or, per contra, from BOTTOM to TOP. And whether their (comparative) size, water density or content, internal or inter-layer activity, growth and body dissipation, edge dissipation, et cetera, varies or not (or how much and why).

• Since, however, there are so MANY questions to ask and answer here, and I have already VIOLATED the limit of anyone's decency, AND of anyone else's merciful tolerance, I WILL SAY NO MORE!

— Patrick Michael Gunkel (Princeton, NJ)

I don't believe that the response was exactly 'terse', however, I did rather enjoy the more in-depth explanation of the lenticular cloud. Thanks for the information.