Lenticular clouds in Scotland
Lenticular clouds (Latin name Atocumulus Lenticularis, or ‘like a lens’) are ‘lens-shaped orographic wave clouds forming when the air is stable and winds blow across hills and mountains from the same or similar direction at different heights through the troposphere’. (Source: UK Meteorological Office).
Orographic means ‘relating to mountains’, which is likely why I’ve always found lenticular clouds highly attractive, their dramatic shapes filling the sky and providing a fine backdrop for mountain landscape photography.
I first encountered such saucer-shaped clouds in the early 2000s when I was in Patagonia, trekking around Cerro Fitz Roy and traversing a section of the Southern Patagonia Ice Cap, plus later, when researching a travel guidebook to Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina. I wasn’t focused on photography back then - there’s not any lenticular clouds in my landscape portfolio at present - but I do have a great example I feel I can share, which is the cover image for US photographer Linde Waidhofer’s large-format coffee-table book, ‘Unknown Patagonia’, which has beautiful images from Chilean Patagonia. You can view Linde’s image and purchase the book at her website - www.westerneye.com.
It’s been very rare for me to see lenticular clouds in person, either in Patagonia or Scotland, and I’ve never had the opportunity to properly photograph them. Unfortunately, this is still the case as the images below were captured in what I’d term ‘run and gun’ style with a Sony RX100 compact camera, from the road-side beneath the Munro, Slioch (‘the Spear’) as we returned from a backpacking trip in Letterewe in the North-West Highlands of Scotland. I’m proposing however that they illustrate exceptional enough conditions for Scotland to warrant sharing.
