Is this a Roll Tide Omen about the coming NCAA national championship Game where LSU will Play the Crimson Tide of Alabama…Is Momma Nature Saying ‘ROLL TIDE!’
Pics from ‘Bama:
According to Chris Walcek , a meteorologist at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the State University of New York, Albany , fast-moving air high in the sky can drag the top of slow-moving, thick clouds underneath it in much the same way.“In the pictures [of the Birmingham sky] there is probably a cold layer of air near the ground where the wind speed is probably low. That is why there is a cloud or fog in that layer,” Walcek told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. “Over this cloudy, cold, slow-moving layer is probably a warmer and faster-moving layer of air.”
Most of the time, the difference in wind speed and temperature between two layers of the atmosphere is small, and so the fast-moving air on top “simply slides smoothly over the slower-moving air like a hockey puck sliding along an ice surface,” Walcek said. At the other extreme, if the wind-speed difference is too large, the interface between the two layers breaks down into random turbulence.Kelvin-Helmholtz waves form when the difference in the temperature and wind speed of the two layers hits a sweet spot. “What [these pictures] show is air between these two atmospheric layers that is just very close to that threshold for turbulence, and mixing to mix the two layers together,” he said
