Morning gloria

An amazing and rather rare natural phenomenon called Morning Gloria or Morning Splendor, if you translate the English name literally, can be seen during the Australian spring, in September or October, in the town of Burktown in Australia.

This phenomenon is an unusual type of clouds, similar to a fur and a very long collar. A rare meteorological phenomenon is observed every year in the spring in the Australian Gulf of Carpentaria and much less often in other areas of the planet. The so-called storm collar of clouds can be as long as one thousand kilometers and located at an altitude of two thousand meters.

Most often, you can watch this miracle in the early morning. The ancient tribes considered the morning glory the message of the gods. The North Australian Gulf of Carpentaria, where you can admire an amazing natural phenomenon, is the bay of the Arafur Sea and is bordered by the islands of Arnhem Land from the west and from the east of Cape York. Carpentaria is rather shallow, the maximum depth is barely 69 meters. But the morning glory here can be accompanied by a wind shear, pressure drops on the surface and squalls. The vertical rapid movement begins in front of the cloud, it moves the air upwards, spinning the clouds, and in the middle and final parts of the clouds the air descends.

Horizontal long cloud tubes are formed when meeting the cooling moist air with an inversion layer or atmospheric region, the temperature in which increases with altitude. Such clouds and their surroundings will be stranded by danger zones for airplanes due to turbulence. Clouds of Morning splendor reach a speed of sixty kilometers per hour. This is possible with virtually no wind on the surface. The first mention of the Morning Gloria refers to 1942. Only in the 70s began the study of the phenomenon in order to calculate the patterns of its occurrence, but so far to no avail.

Scientists and today did not solve the riddle of the regular appearance of an amazing phenomenon in the north of the Australian continent in the Gulf of Carpentaria and its rarer occurrence in other places. The phenomenon was observed over the English Channel, in the center of North America, in Berlin and Siberia, over the Mexican coast and over the Arabian Sea, and also not far from Rio de Janeiro. At the sight of a unique phenomenon, an impression of unreality of what is happening, striking the imagination with an unusual picture, is created.

Majestic cloud bands stretch thousands of kilometers in length, giving the impression of a huge air wave hovering overhead. It is considered to be a sleeping tornado, spiral arms of cyclones and a squall gate predicting a thunderstorm. The appearance of the phenomenon is impossible to predict. Therefore, hang-gliders come to Burktown to fly over amazing air waves.