It’s quite common to see clouds hovering over the Caspian Sea, the planet’s largest inland body of water, but this one, spotted on May 28, 2022, looked a bit more bizarre than the rest. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this view on the morning of May 28th.
This single cloud boasts well-defined edges that looks like something from a cartoon, making it stand out from the more typical diffuse and dispersed cloud cover. Bastiaan van Diedenhoven, an atmospheric scientist at SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, said that this cloud is a small stratocumulus. One place you won’t find any clouds is this hot Jupiter.
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Sharp edges are often formed when dry, warm air coming from land collides with colder moist air over the ocean, and the cloud forms at that boundary. You often see this off the west coast of Africa, but at much larger scales,” said Bastiaan van Diedenhoven, an atmospheric scientist at SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.
