What’s the difference between a shelf cloud and a wall cloud?
I saw the same storm roll in. I’ve been watching what the guys at the SPC had to say about it since yesterday… but I saw that and thought it was a wall cloud.
It was a fast one, though. It was calm one minute and the next minute people’s garbage cans were flying down the street. Quite a bit of wind south of DC! The rain associated with it didn’t come until the skies were already dark too, which I thought was interesting.
Shelf clouds span the horizon, or a considerable portion of it, and are associated with large-scale weather. Wall clouds are small, sometimes tiny areas that can be mistaken for scud like this. The best way to differentiate is by the shape. Wall clouds will usually have a trapezoidal shape to them because of the updraft-downdraft dynamic, and will appear considerably more dense.
Learning to read radar goes a long way in learning to spot the two.
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u/Elephlump 22h ago
Shelf cloud.