Do the clouds cause the turbulence or vice versa
Seems more often than not that it is nice and smooth in cruise until one gets into the high level cloud tops. I guess meteorology was not my area of expertise in ground school so which one causes the other. Do the clouds cause the turbulence or the turbulence cause the clouds. Of course, the answer given might be, the mixing of air causes both. A lot of these sig Wx charts seem to like to call any high level turbulence area as CAT but it seems like the majority of the time when one encounters turbulence in these areas, the air is not clear where the worst of the turbulence is.