Cape Town is a city known for its natural wonders. From mountains that seem to touch the sky, to picturesque beaches that could have been plucked straight out of an Edward Henry Potthast painting, we truly have one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Now we can add strange, dream-like cloud formations to that list of already impressive natural wonders.
A few eagle-eyed Captonians spotted some rather odd cloud formations of the city this weekend and no, they weren’t signs of an impending alien invasion, rather the cloud formations are known as ‘cirrus clouds’ and are a direct result of Cape Town’s weather patterns.
Cirrus clouds form from the ascent of dry air, making the small quantity of water vapour in the air undergo deposition into ice, meaning it changes from a gas directly into a solid. Cirrus clouds are made up completely of ice crystals, which provides their white colour and form in a wide range of shapes and sizes. Cirrus clouds also often indicate the arrival of a warm front as the air masses meet at high levels, indicating a change in the weather is on the way.
Here are just a few of our favourite cirrus cloud formation pictures from this weekend.
Feature image: Facebook/Tanith Cloete
