GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — After Monday night's severe weather many KARE 11 viewers saw some ominous but beautiful clouds, all made more dramatic by a setting sun.
Those clouds are called 'mammatus' clouds, literally from the term 'mammary' in Latin.
Mammatus clouds form on the back side of large cumulonimbus, or storm clouds. While they look scary, they're not funnels or indicative of severe weather but they do usually form off of larger storms which 'can' be severe.
Think of the science this way: What goes up, must come down. It's the basic law of gravity and the same is true of air. As air rises high into a storm cloud, that air descends in all directions too. Mammatus clouds form when cool, moist pockets of air attempt to descend into warmer air and upper level winds smooth out these pockets making for a spectacular scene.