Rare lenticular cloud creates a splashy show over Brazil’s capital

“Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way…

It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all…”

~ Joni Mitchell

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The skies over Brazil’s capital have been taking a break from the wettest string of its rainy season these past days, but recently Imaginations bloomed all over the Federal District as low clouds spread over the city’s Lake Paranoá like the dancing hem of a long and flowing veil and then suddenly exploded into a visual that hit the city like a bomb of wonder.

The blue sky was dotted with lazy, fluffy white clouds while rain developed a little far away and white stratus clouds were pushing east toward the motionless growth of a thunderhead that towered in the sky rising high and standing in the way of the flow.

The soft collision caused the cloud to come down the side of the thunderhead column to the point of overshooting below in a diminishing flow that sprung back into a crescendo when driven back up by the powerful rising columns of water vapor in the vertical column, oscillating while on the upward part of the waves, clouds formed as the rising air cooled, giving the entire thing this circular shape.

The gigantic bowl-shaped splash of cloud that resulted was a rare and beautiful lenticular cloud that raised to the sky soaring above the manmade lake that wraps the city. As rays of sunlight burst onto the squatting wall of cloud, short spells of bright white and golden cut sharply against the blue in what watchers qualified as pure poetry in the air.

Though lenticular clouds usually occur on the lee side of mountains, Brasilia is in relative flatland of the central Planalto highlands of Brazil. This lenticular cloud was caused by the gravity waves of a collision with a high thunderhead that laid out its unmistakable anvil shape and interrupted the airflow of the lower cloud.

The ephemeral beauty lasted some 20 minutes as the ebb and flow of clouds dissolved the spaceship-shaped fantasy and its unreal form and evaporated as clouds often do. Stunned skywatchers around the capital were left searching for adjectives to describe the short-lived visual gift.

“Impressive,” “Fantastic,” “Spectacular!” were comments on the Living Brasilia Expat Forum. One commenter, Brett Spry, joked “UFO’s are here collecting us Martians, I see.” But a note from Lorena MC brought it all together in place and context, “Beautiful! And perfectly fitting into the Neimeyer architecture.”

Oscar Niemeyer, father of Brazilian architecture and one of the key figures in modern design, is central to the form and life in the capital city.

Brasilia is located in the central Cerrado region of Brazil, built by Constitutional mandate and the will of president Juscelino Kubitschek, designed, planned and developed under his direction by urban planner Lúcio Costa, engineer Joaquin Cardozo, and Niemeyer whose structures throughout the city give Brasilia -and Brazil- its form and identity with a unique architecture characterized by his use of circular and sinuous shapes and imbued with patriotic and human symbolism that often unites land and sky.

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