Video captures roll cloud in Texas
This is not your typical cloudy sky. Truck driver Bonnie Mask, who lives near Amarillo, Texas, looked out the window around sunrise last week and spotted an odd sight: a long, tube-shaped formation called a roll cloud.
Mask had the day off and decided to record the strange weather event for her husband, Todd. The video is captured from her deck in Timbercreek Canyon.
“Apparently, it’s pretty rare,” Mask told Yahoo News. She noted that she had never seen anything like it. “There was some cool air that blew over as the cloud blew over the house,” she said, adding that it was “kind of strange.”
"This is fairly rare, by the way, to have these things and see these things," Kim Cunningham, a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, told Yahoo News — "especially when not associated with a thunderstorm. ... It's pretty cool though, and it probably freaked a lot of people out."
According to LiveScience.com, the bizarre cloud is formed when cold air forces warm, moist air higher into the sky. Then strong winds "roll" the cloud into the tube shape parallel to the Earth's surface.
Viewers of the video agreed. Doggone posted on Yahoo, “That is the freakiest thing I have seen so far — weather-wise, that is.” Kari J added, “That is a little eerie and slightly ominous.”
After what Mask estimates to be about 20 or 30 minutes, the long cloud formation, which seems to stretch endlessly across the horizon, rolled on by.
