Outflow Boundary - Effects

Effects

Gust fronts create low-level wind shear which can be hazardous to planes when they takeoff or land. Flying insects, a subset of arthropods, are swept along by the prevailing winds. As such, fine line patterns within weather radar imagery, associated with converging winds, are dominated by insect returns. At the surface, clouds of dust can be raised by outflow boundaries. If squall lines form over arid regions, a duststorm known as a haboob can result from the high winds picking up dust in their wake from the desert floor. If outflow boundaries move into areas of the atmosphere which are stable in the low levels, such as over colder pockets of ocean or through the cold sector of extratropical cyclones, they can create a phenomenon known as an undular bore, which shows up on satellite and radar imagery as a series of transverse waves in the cloud field oriented perpendicular to the low-level winds.