Photo: Jeff Bright / Broken Arrow, OK
A band of intense thunderstorms moved through Oklahoma and Arkansas on the morning of June 12, 2009.
This series of photographs shows how such a storm sometimes appears. Some storm spotters call this the “spaceship” or “UFO” cloud. The official name is “shelf cloud”.
Cold air produced by heavy rain rushes out ahead of the storm; as the cooler denser air lifts the surrounding moisture, it can create this odd-looking cloud. Shelf clouds may or may not be accompanied by severe winds; but they are not tornadoes.
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Comments
Looking out the 11th floor window of her law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera. The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she'd seen before.
"It looked like Armageddon," said Wiggins, a paralegal and amateur photographer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change."
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