On June 16th, several severe, damaging storms rolled across central Pennsylvania. A few weeks back, I highlighted one of the storms that went directly over State College; I had taken a photo of the storm from Altoona, and my friend Tim Buckley had been taking pictures of the storm in State College. He snapped a few other photos of the storms that day, including this beauty. What you see here is a textbook example of mammatus clouds. If you look closely, you see several small bulges appearing to hang down beneath the main cloud level--that's the mammatus. They typically form with particularly intense thunderstorms on the underside of the anvil. This storm was indeed an intense one--Tim also took a video of some small hail falling as the storm went overhead. While these clouds also form with other types of clouds, they are most often seen with cumulonimbus, or thunderstorm clouds. So if you do see mammatus clouds with an approaching storm, be sure to take cover.
