The best Mammatus clouds I ever saw!

I spotted this amazing Mammatus cloud formation when I was living the South of France in a little village called Joch, in the Pyrenees Orientales.

What causes mammatus clouds?

In truth it doesn't seem as if anyone can really explain why Mammatus cloud formations happen, but Wikipedia claims they are caused by 'sharp gradients in temperature, moisture and momentum (wind shear) across the anvil cloud/sub-cloud air boundary, which strongly influence interactions therein.' Hmmmm. Does that make any sense to you?

All I know is that I love the way these clouds look and it has been a goal of mine for around four years to shoot them. And here in the South of France I was finally able to do that.

I was also more recently, here in Bali, able to shoot an entire time-lapse sequence of what I thought to be Mammatus...

...but was later informed by an expert that these are more likely to be Undulatus Asperatus clouds.

Well... I am still learning!

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Here is a good sample image from the internet so you can see what a genuine (and completely awesome!) Mammatus formation looks like.

Source

One day I will find them and I will make an awesome time-lapse film from them!

Thanks for reading everyone. Hope you enjoyed this weeks cloud lesson :)