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Old 3rd Aug 2018, 14:11
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Ian W
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Florida and wherever my laptop is
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Clouds very often do not move with the ambient wind it really depends how they have formed. Some of them like orographic clouds by definition just sit stationary on the hills/mountains that have caused them, exactly like ripples in a fast moving stream caused by a rock on the bottom the ripple may be stationary but the stream water is flowing fast. Just like the ripple in the stream there may be a series downstream of an orographic cloud and if the condensation level is right you can get a series of lenticular clouds that are stationary but are actually formed by the moving air stream.
Cb are normally initiated by a source of 'uplift' in humid unstable air. That uplift can be from a cold front, a hill/mountain, a source of hot warm humid air, or even two colliding winds - for example the sea breezes from East and West coasts in Florida. Cells in Cb do not last that long like a slow lava lamp so what seems to be a stationary Cb may actually be a series of cells building one after the other in the close to the same place. If the air remains unstable (look at wet and dry adiabatic lapse rates if you are interested) then the convection in the storm can be extreme and push right up to and through the tropopause. Hail can be carried up in the storms to considerable heights and at significant speed and be 'thrown' from the storms and reach as far as 20nm from the cloud. However, a strong horizontal windshear interferes with the vertical convective currents and chops the top off the storm.
In the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) storms caused by the hot sea which provide a lot of water vapor to drive convection can reach to 70,000ft not the kind of storm to fly through.
Interesting beasts - but do not assume that they will blow along with the wind - very often they don't.
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