Stunning cloud streets over the Bering Sea

Bearing1 — NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC

On 23 January one of NASA’s satellites captured a stunning image of cloud streets over the Bering Sea. The frozen tundra of Russia is visible on the upper left-hand side of the photo, while Alaska can be seen on the right. Sea ice extends far from both land masses into the ocean.

Bearing2 — In convection rolls, the rising warm air and sinking cool air give the cloud streets their cylindrical shape, leaving the sky in between them clear.

Wikimedia Commons

The thin white lines of clouds that seem to cascade off and away from the sea of ice are known as “cloud streets” because of the way they develop parallel to one another. They are formed by convection rolls of rising warm air and sinking cool air that give the clouds their cylindrical shape, leaving the sky in between them clear. This clear-cloudy pattern then gets blown in the same direction as the wind, giving the impression of parallel rows of streets.

The photo was taken by an instrument known as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), which resides on NASA’s Aqua satellite. This isn’t the first time that MODIS has snapped such a shot. It has caught glimpses of cloud streets in other parts of the world, too. For instance, the image below was captured by MODIS over the Black Sea just a couple weeks before the Bering Sea photo, on 8 January 2015.

Bearing3 — Cloud streets make their way across the Black Sea from its northern shore on Ukraine. Russia sits on the eastern shore at the top right.

Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC

Bearing4 — MODIS has collected images whilst aboard both NASA’s satellite Aqua and satellite Terra. When capturing this image, MODIS was on Terra.

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

Originally published by Cosmos as Stunning cloud streets over the Bering Sea

Megan Toomey

Megan Toomey is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne.

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