KUSA — Colorado's Front Range gets some pretty impressive cloud formations -- and there was an especially unique one in the sky this weekend.
The clouds looked like breaking waves. They're called Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds and named after the two men that discovered the instability that creates them.
9NEWS Stormchaser and Meteorologist Cory Reppenhagen photographed some of these wavy clouds on Friday. He said they really do look like a wave in the ocean because the atmosphere is also a fluid.
Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds get created when channels of air are moving at different speeds or in different directions .... or both. In Friday's case, air coming over the mountains from the west-northwest created a lenticular cloud, and a lighter, faster moving channel of air was moving over top of that cloud from the north.
The faster air pulled the top of that cloud upwards, but being more dense, that cloud piece quickly starts to fall back down while still moving with the current, creating a curl.
Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds are actually common in Colorado in the fall and winter, but to get really good definition in the curls is pretty rare.
When they do curl up nice and tight like that, it doesn’t last long. There is usually only about five minutes or so to get that key photograph. Cory Reppenhagen shot this one on Halloween 2015, the day after one of the most memorable Kelvin-Helmholtz pictures was taken.
Breckenridge Resort tweeted out this amazing picture with the tips of the waves illuminated by the setting sun over the ski area on October 30, 2015.
The National Weather Service posted an amazing aerial view of a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud above a Missouri cloud deck on Friday. The photo was taken by pilot Shawn McCauley with their Aviation Weather Center.
Kelvin-Helmholtz waves can be found in any type of fluid. They are even extraterrestrial, having been observed in the Sun’s atmosphere, on Jupiter, and even in the rings of Saturn.