10 most difficult weather riddles

The Morning Glory cloud is a roll cloud, or arcus cloud, that can be up to 1,000 km long, 1 to 2 km high and often only 100 to 200 metres above the ground. The southern part of the Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia is the only known location where it can be predicted and observed on a more or less regular basis due to the configuration of land and sea in the area.

A long, typically low, horizontal, detached, tube-shaped cloud mass, often appearing to roll slowly about a horizontal axis. The roll cloud, volutus, is a soliton, not attached to other clouds and is an example of an undular bore.

Officially, the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale is used only to describe hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean and northern Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line. Other areas use different scales to label these storms, which are called "cyclones" or "typhoons", depending on the area.

Cirrostratus is a high-level, very thin, generally uniform stratiform genus-type of cloud, composed of ice-crystals.

Sound travels through air at 331.2 meters per second, so after 3 seconds it would travel approximately 1 kilometer.

A white squall is a sudden and violent windstorm at sea which is not accompanied by the black clouds generally characteristic of a squall. The name refers to the white-capped waves and broken water, its meager warning to any unlucky seaman caught in its path. A white squall was allegedly behind the sinking of the brigantine Albatross on May 2, 1961.

Arcus clouds most frequently form along the leading edge or "gust fronts" of thunderstorm outflow; some of the most dramatic arcus formations mark the gust fronts of derecho-producing convective systems. Roll clouds also may arise in the absence of thunderstorms, forming along the shallow cold air currents of some sea breeze boundaries and cold fronts.

The term stratus is used to describe flat, hazy, featureless clouds of low altitude varying in color from dark gray to nearly white. Stratus clouds may produce a light drizzle or a small amount of snow. These clouds are essentially above-ground fog formed either through the lifting of morning fog or through cold air moving at low altitudes over a region.

Tornado Alley is a colloquial term for the area of the United States where tornadoes are most frequent. The term was first used in 1952 as the title of a research project to study severe weather in areas of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, and Minnesota.

Cumulus clouds are clouds which have flat bases and are often described as "puffy", "cotton-like" or "fluffy" in appearance. Cumulus clouds can be formed from water vapor, supercooled water droplets, or ice crystals, depending upon the ambient temperature. They come in many distinct subforms, and generally cool the earth by reflecting the incoming solar radiation.