It’s easy to forget that even the biggest clouds are minuscule in the grand scale of our sprawling world.
NASA recently highlighted a stunning shot of a single cloud bubbling over the Arabian Peninsula, snapped back in September 2024 by an astronaut living aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Every cloud is worthy of admiration, of course, but this particular angle simultaneously reveals the vast yet fragile and limited expanse of our all-important atmosphere.
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Crew Earth Observations (CEO) is a simple yet critical mission undertaken by astronauts aboard the ISS. The requirement? Take a ton of photos of our planet from low-earth orbit.
One of those photos provided a fascinating view of the Arabian Peninsula, one which NASA chose as its Image of the Day on Dec. 21.
The original image is slightly grainy without much contrast—but the finer features really shine when you flip it over and sharpen the details.
The crew member snapped the photo while the ISS flew over southern Iran. We’re looking southwest over the Persian Gulf toward Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Daytime in the summer around the Persian Gulf are brutally hot and humid, with temperatures often exceeding 40 degrees and heat index values that can soar into the 50s.
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Air rising over land likely sparked a sea breeze near the Qatari border, acting like a miniature cold front pushing ashore—along which a line of cumulus clouds developed.
One of those cumulus clouds began towering high into the atmosphere, a precursor to the potential development of a thunderstorm in the region. A vigorous cumulus cloud can tower more than 6,000 metres tall as it evolves into a cumulonimbus cloud.
That cloud probably looked ominously large from the ground. But it looks like little more than a cotton puff from space. It’s even smaller in the context of the full atmosphere, the edge of which can be seen as a blue haze near the top of the photo.
While the full atmosphere extends more than 100 km high, almost all weather occurs within 20 km of the surface—and it takes the most powerful thunderstorm for the tops of a cloud to reach that high.
Header image courtesy of NASA.