Orographic clouds
I am currently in the north of Chile visiting my family. It is very dry here (less than 2 mm of precipitation per year), but one gets to see nice cloud formations near the coast. I took this picture of clouds near Antofagasta, showing a prime example of orographic clouds, that form when moist air is forced upward by topographic features (in this case, the mountains).
- When wind encounters a mountain barrier, it's forced to rise up the mountain slope (windward side)
- As the air rises, it cools adiabatically (due to decreasing pressure with altitude).
If the air contains enough moisture and cools sufficiently to reach its dew point, condensation occurs, forming clouds that appear to "hug" the mountain top or appear stationary, even though there's constant air movement through them.
This looked to me like a text book example of orographic clouds, so I asked claude 3.5 to ghibli the picture.
The first attempt was poor (no idea why it added a tent in there )
My second attempt to make it look more textbook like produced some random arrows showing the direction of the flow. This was my first poor attempt to ghibli some interesting atmospheric flows :-).
