The clouds that frequently produce severe weather—cumulonimbus—are seen building up during the afternoon over the South China Sea.
Spend time on China’s Hainan Island, and chances are good that you will witness a lightning storm. Hainan and neighboring Guangdong province have the highest density of cloud-to-ground flashes and the most lightning related casualties in the country.
The clouds that frequently produce such severe weather—cumulonimbus—are seen building up during the afternoon. The image (top) was acquired at 2 p.m. China Standard Time (06:00 Universal Time) on May 11, 2020, with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The time-series animation shows the growth of the clouds over the course of the day, as observed by Japan’s Himawari-8 satellite.
“It’s definitely a cumulonimbus cloud,” said Paul Markowski, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. “And it’s sitting over the highest terrain in the center of the island.”
Continue reading at NASA Earth Observatory
Image via NASA Earth Observatory
