Mount Washington Helps Create Spectacular "Mothership" Cloud

Colby Morris took this photo of a spectacular lenticular
cloud over Mount Washington, New Hampshire Tuesday.

There's a photo floating around social media these days of what looks like a mothership about to grab New Hampshire's Mount Washington and take it to, I don't know, it's home planet light years away. 

For once, the photo is not AI. It's the real deal, showing a spectacular lenticular cloud over New England's highest peak.  You can see the photo in this post. 

Feel free to click on it to make it bigger and easier to see. 

The photo was taken by Colby Morris, a Mesonet and Information Systems Technician, who spotted the cloud at around 8 a.m. Tuesday while he was on his way to Crawford Notch. The observatory posted the photo on their Facebook page. 

Many people who saw the photo on Facebook had the same reaction I did. Here are some of the comments:

"Show us on the doll where the aliens touched you."

"That's clearly a cloud obstructing an alien landing on the summit. We saw the exact same thing in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.'

"Beam me up, Scotty."

"Is this the portal back to reality? You know the dimension where humans actually act like human beings? Pretty please??!"

Unfortunately, the cloud is not that portal back to reality. We're stuck in our Earthly madness. 

Mount Washington Observatory photographed the 
same cloud a bit earlier than Morris did, at sunrise
yesterday The bottom of that lenticular cloud is
on the left with the sun illuminating a ring at 
the bottom of the cloud. 

What hovered over Mount Washington is a lenticular cloud, which are actually kind of common near mountains. This one was just  much larger, uniquely shaped and more spectacular than most.  

 As the Mount Washington Observatory explains:

"They usually form when a relatively strong flow of stable air flows into a barrier, most commonly a mountain range, and is forced upward. As the air ascents, it expands and cools. If the air has sufficient moisture, this cooling may be enough to cause condensation to occur, and therefore generate clouds. 

Because the air is stable, however, it will resist this vertical motion and seek to descent to its former level. As it descends, it will contract and warm, causing the newly formed cloud to evaporate. What is unique about these clouds is that they are very dynamic, and while each individual air parcel is undergoing the cycle of cooling and condensing and warming and evaporating, visually, the cloud appears to be standing still."

The edges of the clouds look smooth because the strong winds associated with them sculpt the cloud. That smooth appearance is why the clouds have that "lenticular" name. 

This type of cloud appears here in Vermont and elsewhere in northern New England a few times a year. They can form any time there is some sort of mountain range in the vicinity and the atmospheric conditions are right. 

The atmosphere around Mount Washington Tuesday was conducive to a particularly wild standing wave cloud.  

Lenticular clouds are not dangerous to those of us on the ground. We're not going to be sucked up into an alien spaceship. But they are dangerous to aircraft. They're a sign of severe, risky turbulence. When pilots seen these clouds, they try to avoid the area.