Sea of clouds

A sea of clouds is an overcast layer of clouds, viewed from above, with a relatively uniform top which shows undulations of very different lengths resembling waves.[1] A sea of fog is formed from stratus clouds or fog and does not show undulations.[2]

Sea of clouds in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc

In both cases, the phenomenon looks very similar to the open ocean. The comparison is even more complete if some mountain peaks rise above the clouds, thus resembling islands.

Formation

A sea of clouds forms generally in valleys or over seas in very stable air mass conditions such as in a temperature inversion. Humidity can then reach saturation and condensation leads to a very uniform stratocumulus cloud, stratus cloud or fog. Above this layer, the air must be dry. This is a common situation in a high-pressure area with cooling at the surface by radiative cooling at night in summer, or advection of cold air in winter or in a marine layer.

Artistic uses

gollark: Everyone loves vast quantities of highly dubiously useful data!
gollark: My laptop and any recent Intel iGPU-having thing has VP9 hardware encoding capability, but when I tried that the filesize was way bigger than with software encoding; it's likely I just needed to tune it somehow, but I couldn't be bothered.
gollark: VP9 did work and encoding happened at not *unusably* awful speeds (0.25x).
gollark: I tried compiling AV1 encoders for some reason (I think seeing how ridiculously small I could make some videos without terrible quality?) but one of the things I couldn't get working and the others were either bad somehow or horribly slow.
gollark: Kind of bad performance generally, though.

References

  1. World Meteorological Organization. "Sea of clouds". Eumetcal. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved February 22, 2015.
  2. World Meteorological Organization. "Sea of fog". Eumetcal. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved February 22, 2015.
  3. Maitland, Derek; Taylor, Chris (1998). Traveler's China companion. Old Saybrook: Globe Pequot Press. p. 20. ISBN 9780762702497.


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