![]() Figure 1 depicts the locations of various features (estuaries, seamounts. Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at and has been an incurable weather geek since a tornado narrowly missed his childhood home in Wisconsin at age 7. West Florida Shelf, situated off the west coast of Florida, is the largest continental shelf area in the United States. Most of the time, there is no persistent rotation on a vertical axis within shelf clouds or within cloud fragments that extend downward from the shelf cloud, so they are just a scary-looking, but spectacular cloud. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), most false tornado and funnel cloud reports are associated with shelf clouds. Shelf clouds can look scary because they are usually low hanging, sometimes only 200 feet above the ground. The parent squall line was responsible for a rash of wind damage across the Deep South on June 17. Wind gusts once the shelf cloud has passed may be quite strong, causing downed trees, tree limbs and power outages. ![]() ![]() Instead, we think this was simply a part of the squall line's rain-cooled outflow that was much stronger in this area than elsewhere along the line, hence the shelf cloud "bulge" from right to left near the center of Bradford's photo above.Īs a shelf cloud passes, you feel an abrupt shift in wind direction and increased wind speed, followed within minutes by heavy rain or hail. This was not a tornado, nor was it an atmospheric foot poised to stomp on Orange Beach. A bizarre shelf cloud "bulge" is seen over Orange Beach, Alabama, on the evening of June 17, 2016.
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