Easterly Morning Glory Cloud
This is an Easterly Morning Glory photographed at Burketown in 2005. Earlier, a breeze denoting a soliton had come over the airfield while most of us were still preparing for take-off. Shortly thereafter a radio call came through from a Morning Glory virgin who said whe was on the front of the cloud, in sink. In other words, he was going down when the book said he should be going up. “You’re on a Southerly”, was the reply, “you need to get to the other side”. I launched and caught up with him, and this is the result. It was a bottler, one of the best Southerlies I’ve flown. It reformed and became stronger as it went out to sea. We left it at the north end of Mornington as the sharks get awful big our there, and anyway we didn’t have our passports with us.
In the mid 1990’s I was soaring a weak Southerly when I spotted a Nor-Easter coming in from the sea so I motored up and headed out to it – the really strong ones all come from the north east. Before I got there, I spotted yet another coming from the east, so I climbed to get a better view. There were lines of clouds coming from three directions, covering the sky as far as you could see. Later I phoned Doug Christie, the Canberra earth scientist who first brought the phenomena to the attention of the scientific world. He was not quite as excited as I was perhaps…
On another occasion I was soaring a wave over the Northern Territory border near Booraloola when I saw a second set coming up from the south west.
More photos at http://dropbears.com/m/morning_glory/