Mammatus cloud

[1] Mammatus may appear as smooth, ragged or lumpy lobes and may be opaque or translucent.

Because mammatus occur as a grouping of lobes, the way they clump together can vary from an isolated cluster to a field of mammae that spread over hundreds of kilometers to being organized along a line, and may be composed of either unequal or similarly-sized lobes.

True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system.

Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time.

[4][6] One environmental trend is shared by all of the formation mechanisms hypothesized for mammatus clouds: sharp gradients in temperature, moisture and momentum (wind shear) across the anvil cloud/sub-cloud air boundary, which strongly influence interactions therein.

Mammatus cloud seen at Puthenpeedika , India
Mammatus clouds formation in Coimbatore, India
Mammatus clouds over the Nepal Himalayas
Mammatus clouds on a cumulonimbus capillatus
Panorama of mammatus cloud formations in Swifts Creek, Victoria
Mammatus cloud formation lit by sunset in Visakhapatnam, India
Several pouches of mammatus clouds seen under cumulonimbus incus in Biñan , Laguna , Philippines