A Kármán vortex street is a pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow over a cylinder, sphere, or in this case, the mountains of an island chain. NASA’s MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) captured this image of a Vortex Street off the Aleutian Islands.
You can click on the image to the right to see a high-resolution image where every pixel is about 1 km. The image size is 1,200 x 1,600 pixels and is a 817 KB Jpeg image. However, if you go to the site below, you can see a very high-resolution image where every pixel is about 250 meters. That image size is 4,800 x 6,400 pixels and is a 6.9 MB Jpeg image.
Interesting cloud patterns were visible over the Aleutian Islands in this image, captured by the MODIS on the Aqua satellite on March 14, 2010. Turbulence, caused by the wind passing over the highest points of the islands, is producing the pronounced eddies that swirl the clouds into a pattern called a vortex “street”. In this image, the clouds have also aligned in parallel rows or streets. Cloud streets form when low-level winds move between and over obstacles causing the clouds to line up into rows (much like streets) that match the direction of the winds. At the point where the clouds first form streets, they’re very narrow and well-defined. But as they age, they lose their definition, and begin to spread out and rejoin each other into a larger cloud mass.
via MODIS Website.
