Worldview 3

In this shot of tropical storm 13S Felleng the highly asymmetric structure demonstrates the effect of shear on a tropical cyclone.

This rapidly developing mid-latitude cyclone (MLC) would eventually produce hurricane force winds. At this time it had just begun to be occluded and was in the process of ingesting a tropical disturbance, the remnants of which are at the end of the main front near the Philippines.

 

I've posted several images of von Karman waves before, but although this shot is of clouds formed in the lee of an island, this is clearly a very different type of wave.

 

This wide shot captures two tropical cyclones impacting opposite ends of Australia. On the left is TS Peta, which was very short lived, and TD Oswald, which lasted for a surprisingly long time over land before dissipating.

 

A major source of large scale weather features in the tropics are pressure waves that ripple around the Earth, each at different speeds, direction, and intensity. Parts of these waves favor cloud formation near the surface, such as convective cloud clusters and tropical cyclones. This very wide shot appears to show signs of one of these waves in the form of the rather evenly spaced systems that happen to be centered in each of the swaths, just north the equator. From the left the systems are: an invest area in the North Indian basin, TS Sonamu, an invest area just east of the Philippines, and some other unorganized cloud cluster.

 

Rain shadows are well known, but here the Olympic Mountains in Washington State are creating a noticeable "snow shadow".



In this image the location of the subtropical jet, a powerful upper level air flow, is betrayed by streaks of high cirrus over Southeast Asia.





This shot, which happens to be from just east of the image of Felleng above, captures a cloud cluster that happens to look a whole lot like the head of a dragon.