Clouds That Look like Ocean Captured over Minnesota in Incredible Photo

A spectacular picture of the clouds looking like a stormy sea has gone viral on Reddit.

The picture, captured by Minnesota local Theresa Birgin Lucas, was shared to Reddit by user u/Harvickfan4Life in a post that has amassed over 88,000 upvotes. It shows gray, thick cloud towering over a road, giving the appearance that the whole ocean is hovering only a few dozen feet above the ground.

Clouds, which are plumes of condensed water vapor in the sky, come in many shapes, sizes and colors depending on the atmospheric conditions, temperature and size of the water droplets. According to the National Weather Service, there are four core types of cloud, namely cirro-form, cumulo-form, nimbo-form and strato-form.

Cirro-form clouds are high and wispy, cumulo-form are generally detached clouds resembling white fluffy cotton balls, strato-form clouds are wide blanket-like clouds, while nimbo-form are a rainy cloud category combining elements of the other three types.

Experts are torn on what kind of cloud may have made the sky appear as it does in the photo, with some doubt being cast on its authenticity.

"The picture looks fake to me," Katja Friedrich, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor at the University of Colorado, told Newsweek. "First there seems to be a light source on the lower left and upper right—maybe now we have two suns? Second, it looks like the lower clouds are moving in from the left, while the upper cloud is thicker on the right, which might suggest that it moves in from the right.

"I am also not sure why a cloud should be slanted towards us—it almost looks like a wall cloud but why is the upper part so far in the background?"

Others, however, have suggested that the strange oceanic cloud may be a rare form of cloud that was only added to the International Cloud Atlas as a supplementary feature in March 2017.

"The picture appears to be real and the cloud formation is called asperitas," Tero Mielonen, an atmospheric scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, told Newsweek.

Asperitas are, according to the International Cloud Atlas, well-defined, wave-like structures in the underside of a cloud, with localized waves in the cloud base, "as if viewing a roughened sea surface from below."

Ed Gryspeerdt and Paulo Ceppi, cloud scientists at Imperial College London, told Newsweek that they also thought the picture may capture an asperitas cloud.

"We could imagine that if the lighting conditions were just right and the photo was cropped just right, maybe you could get something like this. We can't picture the 3D structure in our heads though, so we are not sure we can make a proper judgment on it. Asperitas clouds often have this strange kind of lighting, so that would be a good candidate," they said in a joint-statement.

"One thing we would say, from having taken many, many photos of clouds, is that producing that very dark blue is pretty difficult. Not impossible, but clouds are typically overexposed if you also have ground in the image, so are usually very white, unless you are trying to do something to increase the contrast. Maybe HDR on a phone could do that."

Newsweek has reached out to Theresa Birgin Lucas for comment.