DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN (THE SKY OVER BERLIN) AND OTHER METEOROLOGICAL MARVELS

Yesterday, as I left the house to run an errand at our neighborhood copy shop, I noticed that the sky had turned an ominous shade of slate gray.

I couldn’t determine whether the weather was heading toward or away from me, so I decided to run counter to form and be optimistic. I hadn't far to go, so I continued. When I exited the copy shop about 15 minutes later, I felt a drop, then another, and another, and I realized that I had drastically miscalculated. The heavens suddenly opened, thunder clapped, the sky turned black, and the wind picked up—not just metaphorically, but literally, as you'll see.

The backs of my legs having been thoroughly drenched, I decided to wait out the storm. I took shelter in a recessed doorway with a generous overhang from the balcony above, sharing my refuge with a young woman who turned out to be from Naples. We struck up a lively conversation complete with established hand gestures, and as we watched the rain move in horizontal sheets across the main shopping street, all of a sudden in mid-sentence, she gasped.

An elderly man who was crossing the street across from us had been blown right over. The owners of the Chicken Club restaurant (above and open for take-out during Covid Times!) must have been watching the storm, too, as they rushed out and brought the man inside. I hope he was OK.

The cells passed after five or ten minutes, and a brilliant double rainbow (photo courtesy of our neighbor H) arced across the rain-washed sky. My Italian companion and I decided it was safe to venture out, said our mask-muffled “Ciao’s!” and headed off on our separate ways.

A block from my house, I saw a woman staring up at the now-blue sky with her cell phone, taking a photo. When I turned my gaze in the direction her phone was pointing, I saw this:

I took a photo, too, and hurried home to research what the hell I’d just seen. Turns out those clouds are a thing. They’re called mammatus clouds, also called mamma or mammatocumulus, and you can read all about them here. In 25 words or less, they are not a type of cloud per se, but rather a cloud feature. According to the Wiki article cited, these lumpy, cotton-ball-looking undersides of clouds “are formed by cold air sinking down to form the pockets contrary to the puffs of clouds rising through the convection of warm air.” They are most associated with the extreme turbulence and wind shear that accompany severe thunderstorms like the one Berliners experienced yesterday afternoon.

Here is how t-Online described the moment (via a clunky Google translation):

First it rained heavily, then the sky turned orange and put the clouds over Berlin in the limelight. A short time later, the social media are full of weather images. On Thursday evening, Berliners were able to marvel at clouds, as if they had been painted with a brush, in the sky over the capital. The storm "Klaus" is currently moving across the north and west of Germany. Berlin is in the area of influence of the storm low, it said in the weather forecast of the German weather service. The weather spectacle with "hanging, fluffy clouds" can often be observed after thunderstorms, confirmed the DTN weather service when asked by t-online. The mammatus clouds are created by the downdrafts after the thunderstorm has passed. The name comes from Latin and can be translated as "breast-like".