The stratocumulus cloud in the picture has fostered a 100-kilometer-long layer. Commonly, these cloud occur at low elevations, between 600 and 2,000 meters above the earth. The one in the photo was most likely hanging at 1,500 meters in altitude.

Digital Desk: Clouds are frequently seen hovering over the Caspian Sea, the world’s greatest inland waterway. However, NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) found an strangely structured cloud travelling across the water body on May 28. In dramatic contrast to the ordinary diffused and dispersed cloud cover, the cloud had well-defined edges resembling something from a cartoon or something painted onto the countryside.

The cloud is a little stratocumulus cloud, as per Bastiaan van Diedenhoven, an atmospheric scientist at SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research. Cumulus clouds are separable “heaps” of “cauliflower-shaped” cloud that should be visible during great climate. In stratocumulus cloud, these heaps are clumped together, forming a widespread horizontal layer of clouds.

The stratocumulus cloud in the picture has developed a 100-kilometer-long layer. Regularly, these cloud occur at low elevations, somewhere in the range of 600 and 2,000 meters over the earth. The one in the photograph was no doubt hanging at 1,500 meters in altitude.

The cloud was over the middle Caspian in the late morning when the photograph was taken. It had travelled northwest by the evening and was poised above the central Caspian. By the evening, it had moved northwest and was hugging the shore of Makhachkala, Russia, in a low-lying plain close to the Caucasus Mountains’ lower regions.

The cloud could have developed over the Caspian when warm, dry air collided with colder, moister air, according to van Diedenhoven. It could then have drifted across the water before dissipating when it came to rest on shore.

“At the point when dry, warm air from the land collides with cooler, moister air over the sea, sharp edges are much of the time formed, and the cloud forms at that boundary.” “You ordinarily see this off the west coast of Africa, but on considerably greater sizes,” van Diedenhoven said in a news release, explaining how the cloud’s formation also explains its sharp edges.