Cyclone Center Talk

Perplexing Formation

  • WailingWolf by WailingWolf

    I marked this as an embedded center based on the spiraling of the surrounding clouds and the formation's symmetry. However, I am uncertain regarding the accuracy of my response. This formation also seems to have many qualities of a shear formation. Most shear formations I've viewed have a collection of the coldest clouds on one side with warmer clouds surrounding to form a vague "round arrowhead". This bizarre storm certainly looks like a shear formation with regards to the extremely thin layering of warmer clouds near the core of colder clouds. Can shear formations be comprised of primarily cold clouds with a high degree of symmetry? Can shear formations be this circular?

    Posted

  • Struck by Struck moderator, translator

    Hello WailingWolf,

    welcome to 'Cyclone Center'. 😉

    Thank you for your post here and for your questions.
    Don't worry about your response during the classifcation of storm-pictures. 😉

    Every click and every classification is important for this project to help to understand the development of storms.
    With the classifications to every single storm-picture, the final results are determined by the community and their 'summarized' opinion about a storm.
    So we are very happy about every single opinion to get the most accurate final results.

    A very good tool to help you with the classifcation accuracy is this discussion-board here, also to get a better feeling about some difficult storm-pictures.
    So feel free to start a discussion about your classified storm-pictures to get more opinions from the community. 😉

    In this case I would tend to an #embedded-center, too.
    In my opinion this storm-picture has the following features:

    • A clockwise wind-rotation around the storm-center
    • The blue area (cold clouds) has a round formation and looks like a circle
    • The storm-center is located near to the center of the dark-blue area of the storm

    Shear-fomations have most flattened sides, where the storm has different wind directions. These different wind-directions could be recognized by a grey or white wind-swirl.
    Also most of the shear-storms have their storm-center near this flattened side.

    Because of the one wind-direction and the location of the storm-center, I would tend to an #embedded-center, too.

    I hope, I could help you with some hints.

    Posted

  • peterthorne by peterthorne moderator

    WailingWolf,

    I would also go embedded but I think you are correct to also suspect some shear. To my view there is likely moderate East to West shear going on. The East side looks a little flat. I would not at this point consider the shear the dominant factor.

    The really good news is that if you had classified either as wek embedded or 3rd/4th strongest shear the resulting intensity estimates would have been very similar. Even better news if half went shear and half went embedded we'd know it were likely transitioning between the two.

    So, there is no really wrong answer here and you identified the two I would say were plausible and went with the one I would have picked in the end. Keep classifying - you are doing great.

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  • WailingWolf by WailingWolf

    Thank you for the helpful comments 😃.

    Posted

  • cch001 by cch001 scientist

    Very good question and responses! -Chris

    Posted