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Unpopular opinion: most people misidentify mammatus clouds
I keep seeing folks in this group calling any bumpy, pouch-looking clouds mammatus when half the time they're actually asperitas or just regular cumulus with weird edges. Last week during that storm system over Denver I spotted real mammatus hanging under a shelf cloud, and the difference is pretty clear up close. Mammatus form on the underside of a thunderstorm anvil, while asperitas shows up as wavy layers lower down. Has anyone else noticed this mix-up or am I being too picky?
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nora_campbell6611d ago
Mammatus vs asperitas is a pet peeve of mine too. Best way to tell is look at the sky layer - if the pouches are hanging down from a flat anvil top during a storm, that's mammatus. If the whole cloud deck looks wavy and rolling like the ocean from below with no thunderstorm above, that's asperitas. Saw someone last month post a pic of some really distinct shelf cloud bubbles calling them mammatus when it was just strong wind shear making the edge of a squall line look bumpy. Weather apps make this worse too since they label any weird cloud as mammatus in their databases.
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lilymurphy11d ago
Read this thing from a meteorologist blog that said mammatus clouds basically tell you "hey a storm was just here or is nearby" while asperitas is more of a standalone weird sky pattern with no real thunderstorm attached. It stuck with me because I've definitely mislabeled my own photos before, especially that one time I caught a sunset with these rippling bands that looked super dramatic but turned out to be altocumulus stratiformis undulatus or something boring like that. The whole database thing drives me nuts too, every stock photo site tags lumpy clouds as mammatus even when they clearly aren't. Makes it harder for people trying to actually learn the difference when the reference material is wrong.
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