photo #9341419

‘These undulating clouds took my breath away,’ said Connie Simon (Cloud Appreciation Society Member 58,544), who spotted them as she stepped outside in Aptos, California, US. ‘They looked like they were leaping across the sky as they moved east.’These wavy strips of this unusual Stratocumulus formation are likely the cloud features known as asperitas, named with the Latin word for ‘roughness’. The distinctively chaotic and turbulent-looking waves of asperitas more typically appear in a continuous cloud layer. Here, the conditions in which the waves developed meant cloud was only able to form very thin and gauze-like between the much thicker wave crests, where the air was cooling the most. In the thin cloud between the crests, Connie could see bands of pastel hues known as cloud iridescence, where the tiny cloud droplets were diffracting the sunlight shining through.Connie was not alone in appreciating this rare display. Other members in her area sent us their spottings of the same sky that day. We love it when clouds hold the power to capture the attention of all below.