Dramatic Skies

A combination of aggressive weather features have made this early winter in New Zealand great for landscape photography. The astronomical, official start of winter coincided with a change in jet stream flow that that brought frigid, moist air up from the Antarctic resulting in several weeks of lows and associated fronts. This was very cold air pushing up over abnormally warm seas, the perfect formula for making dramatic cloudscapes sculpted by high winds and descending cold air.

In addition a Tongan undersea volcano violently erupted to the north of New Zealand in January, putting large amounts of fine volcanic ash and aerosol into the upper atmosphere. The Tongan explosion is the largest recorded in modern times and produced an atomic bomb-like mushroom cloud of gas and ash with a diameter the size of Spain or Britain.

According to New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research the vibrant extra-colorful sunrises/sets recently seen may be caused by the higher than normal levels of particulates in the stratosphere. They scatter and bend light creating a color enhancing glow in the sky.

Most of this gallery’s photos were taken in the past few weeks from the front veranda; however, there are two images from the past that are good examples of robust weather seen from our house. The clouds in file 0854 are mammatus type caused by pockets of descending cold air, and file 0578 is the base of a supercell over Summit Ridge to our east. A supercell is a thunder storm cell with a deep long lived rotating updraft that has the potential to cause severe weather with large hail and tornadoes. The image from Meteoblue is a satellite photo with radar showing strong convection in blue from June 7. The large complex low had spent the previous several days crossing west to east over New Zealand. The popcorn-looking clouds to the south of the country are from frigid north-flowing Antarctic air.

If you want dramatic landscape skies look for hot and cold air mixing plus volcanic ash circulating in the upper atmosphere.