Appearance
At ground level, shelf clouds and roll clouds can be seen at the leading edge of outflow boundaries. Through satellite imagery, an arc cloud is visible as an arc of low clouds spreading out from a thunderstorm. If the skies are cloudy behind the arc, or if the arc is moving quickly indicate that high wind gusts are likely behind the gust front. Sometimes a gust front can be seen on weather radar, showing as a thin arc or line of weak radar echos pushing out from a collapsing storm. The thin line of weak radar echoes is known as a fine line. Occasionally, winds caused by the gust front are so high in velocity that they also show up on radar. This cool outdraft can then energize other storms which it hits by assisting in updrafts. Gust fronts colliding from two storms can even create new storms. Usually, however, no rain accompanies the shifting winds. An expansion of the rain shaft near ground level, in the general shape of a human foot, is a telltale sign of a downburst. Gustnadoes, short-lived vertical circulations near ground level, can be spawned by outflow boundaries.
Read more about this topic: Outflow Boundary
Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)