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- Amy Christie Hunter told INSIDER she spotted a bizarre cloud formation materializing over Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia on Tuesday evening.
- The wave-like clouds were so striking that Hunter snapped a photo.
- The result was reminiscent of Van Gogh's iconic 1889 painting "The Starry Night."
- Hunter saw Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, rare formations that form when differences in wind speed between the upper and lower levels of atmospheric air curl a cloud over itself, according to the Met Office.
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A woman in Virginia captured a stunning and rare natural occurrence in a photo that resembles a literal masterpiece.
Amy Christie Hunter told INSIDER she spotted a bizarre cloud formation materializing over Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia on Tuesday evening. The wave-like clouds were so striking that Hunter snapped a photo, and the result is reminiscent of the swirling brushwork in the sky of Van Gogh's iconic 1889 painting "The Starry Night."
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Hunter sent her photo to her local news station, according to a post she shared on her Facebook page that has since garnered hundreds of likes and comments. According to Hunter, the meteorologist told her that the clouds she spotted "are very rare and usually not this defined."
What Hunter saw and captured are called Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds. According to the Met Office, these cloud shapes form when differences in wind speed between the upper and lower levels of atmospheric air curl a cloud over itself.
"It really is like breaking waves," Patrick Chuang, a cloud physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Wired in 2009. "A wave breaks when the water on top moves so much faster than the water below that it kind of piles up on itself."
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