Rare Shelf Cloud At Beach Storm July 18

July 18 – Some of the best summer storms are at the beach. That is, when you are safely inside, looking over the ocean.  Today, another visual event was seen along the Delaware and Maryland coast. What you see here are shelf clouds with a rare outreach along the gust front. The push of cool air down from the top of the storm interacting with the rising warm moist air ahead of it makes it look like these clouds are stretching down and then flatten out where the air is stable again.

I was tempted to telestrate to show what I mean, but I don’t want to ruin any of these pics. Here are more views  from along the coastline. Also see some of the best beach storm photos over the past year in links at the bottom of this post. There was a plethora of rainbow photos that followed, but I wanted to just focus on this cloud formation for this post. I will share the best rainbow pic later.

Here is a look from north to south. Pretty cool, huh?