The Water Cycle - visualised

Rarely do we get to witness (notice) geography at work like this

We were visiting Bournemouth on a staycation, and this phenomenon was forming the backdrop at the beach we were on. As one who lives inland — the initial thoughts around seeing something like this was that there must be a man-made incident of some sort — namely a fire. It definitely seemed to originate at a specific location, and then grew across the sky as it was blown by the coastal winds. It behaved very much like smoke does and can.

However, upon further investigation and examination - it wasn’t a fire at all -but the birth of a cloud!! I did report this excitedly to my family - only to have this met with all the indifference of a geography GCSE student.

I continued to marvel at this extremely visual demonstration of the evaporation part of the Water Cycle - the process in which water falls as (mainly) precipitation on land, but then eventually finds its way back to the skies by evaporation back up off the land and bodies of water.

Were it not for the strong winds, this would simply have looked like dark clouds sitting atop the Isle of Wight - nothing to write home about. However in this instance the wind afforded a fantastic visual insight into cloud formation in real-time.

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