Harry is a U.K.-based senior staff writer at Live Science. He studied marine biology at the University of Exeter before training to become a journalist. He covers a wide range of topics including space exploration, planetary science, space weather, climate change, animal behavior, evolution and paleontology.
What's in the photo? A massive, jellyfish-shaped thunderstorm cloud.When was it taken? Sept. 27, 2018.
The oddly shaped cloud, which was roughly 185 miles long, was spotted above central Mali by the Suomi NPP weather satellite, which is co-run by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . The"bell" of the jellyfish is located above the city of Mopti, while the"tentacles" stretch into Burkina Faso, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
"The arc-shape line of clouds is caused by less dense air being lifted up and over the boundary," Joseph Munchak, a meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Earth Observatory. Normally, this creates a large disk of elevated clouds, known as shelf or roll clouds, which often looks like an anvil when viewed from the ground. But in this case, only part of the disk formed because the outflow boundary was partially disrupted by wind shear, Munchak said.
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