The world's biggest wave
It starts as a rumble in the jungle. Two sea breezes thump into each other over the steamy rainforests of Cape York Peninsula in Australia’s far north, their silent collision spawning a meteorological tsunami.
Growing and building like a mysterious dark force through the thick air of a humid tropical night, the wave picks up the equivalent of an airborne ocean, until by daybreak, it appears as an awesome rolling wave; up to three kilometres high, its front face sheer and ominous, its back a turbulent train. The wave stretches for up to 1,000 kilometres, thundering across the savannah at speeds of 40–60 km/h, sometimes within 100 metres of the ground.
This is the spectacular Morning Glory cloud, an extraordinary meteorological phenomenon found in several places around the world, but not with the same regularity and predictability as it appears near the Gulf of Carpentaria.
‘These are the biggest waves on the planet,’ says Dr Doug Christie, a fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra who conducted rigorous scientific studies on Morning Glories during the 1980s. ‘They have amplitudes of well over a kilometre – sometimes two to three kilometres. That’s a huge wave.’
The phenomenon has increasingly attracted worldwide attention – the 2009 season had two film crews from Japan and another from the USA recording the monster waves.
And since the 1990s, the gliding community has eagerly awaited the Morning Glory season each year. Like the most daring of big-wave surfers, they fly into the path of the oncoming wave and ride up its enormous face, soaring higher and higher, and using its immense power to propel them onwards and upwards.
According to Paul Pulle, a long-term resident of Burketown, Queensland – which has fully formed Morning Glories passing overhead an average of 30 or so times a year – during the peak season (from the beginning of September through to the second week in November), there are usually six gliders on the ground at any one time. ‘This year, there were also hang-gliders, trikes, gyrocopters – it was a real mishmash,’ he says. The pilots travel to the remote town from across Australia and overseas. ‘They’ll come from anywhere.’
Glider pilot Rick Bowie from Byron Bay in New South Wales is one such keen pilot. ‘You can just soar on and on for an hour or more, doing acrobatics, anything you want,’ he says. ‘Meanwhile, the sight of this wave-shaped cloud and its outrageous size are just blowing you away.’
Although different Aboriginal groups have words for Morning Glory clouds, no mythology seems to have developed around them. And surprisingly, for such an incredible phenomenon, they don’t appear in Australia’s post-colonial history until 1934, Christie says. ‘The first reference that I’ve found was in The Bulletin magazine in Sydney – a brief unsigned letter on 12 September 1934, an anonymous correspondent asking a question about the phenomenon.’ One of the next mentions is by RV Deering, a weather officer based at Karumba during the late 1930s.
‘The number of Morning Glories varies quite widely from year to year – it depends on a whole host of factors, such as how much water is on the surface, and when the wet comes,’ Christie says. ‘They occur all year round, but conditions are best in August to November. You certainly will see them in April, May and June. It’s synoptically controlled – meaning there will be five days where you have something, and five days where you don’t. Mostly it depends on when there is a ridge of high pressure over the peninsula and low pressure to the south of Burketown.’
Christie’s research has identified the dangers for pilots at low altitude in northern Australia, particularly in the majority of cases when the intense air wave is created, but conditions aren’t humid enough to form a visible cloud. ‘Often it’s too dry to form the cloud – it will just come through as a wind squall,’ he says. ‘These clear-air ones are more dangerous because pilots can’t see them.’
Pulle says the locals have various ways of predicting whether the clouds will appear in the morning. ‘You get a lot of condensation the night before,’ he says. ‘So if you go to the pub and the fridge doors are fogged up badly, you’ll get one.’ There may also be dew on the roof of the car. ‘It’s just when it’s really high humidity. The temperature is 23°C on the ground and the dew point is also 23°C.’
Christie discovered that there are three ‘families’ of Morning Glory clouds in the region: each have slightly different causes, but all can be active at the same time. One group form and travel from the south and southwest, another group from the southeast, but most are northeasterly to easterlies. They start around 8.30–9pm when a sea breeze from the Coral Sea and another from the Gulf of Carpentaria collide about 300 kilometres south of the tip of Cape York Peninsula in a warm, stable air layer near the ground, some 400–1,200 metres deep.
‘When they collide, the atmosphere is thrown up, and as it sorts itself out, these waves come out,’ Christie says. Moist air from near the ground is lifted up the smooth, leading edge of the wave, then rolls over the back. ‘Sometimes, only one wave is produced, but it can be a series of these things.’ If a series of waves develops, they will be amplitude-ordered, with the biggest wave first.
Around 11pm, the wave rumbles over the remote township of Pormpuraaw (formerly Edward River), about 200 kilometres farther south. ‘They’re quite common at that point,’ Christie says. ‘They haven’t had a chance to deteriorate or run into other weather that might stop them.’
If the pre-dawn weather remains calm and clear, the Morning Glory continues to roll south-southwest, appearing over Burketown in the early morning, where the glider pilots are waiting. The clouds rarely bring rain, but are often associated with a short, intense wind squall near the surface. Morning Glories don’t usually last long – after an hour or so of sun on them, they evaporate.
In 1980, Christie joined the second-ever flight into the path of a Morning Glory in a powered glider. ‘I think it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘It was only 200 metres up and we had come to the front of it – it’s like a sheet of ice that’s just a mountain coming at you.’ The pilot, Russell White, flew straight at it, making a sharp turn just before hitting it. ‘It’s just like going up a steep escalator. The wing was no more than five to ten metres from the face of this thing.’
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, head of the Somerset-based Cloud Appreciation Society UK, has also seen the Morning Glories up close. ‘The remarkable thing about the Morning Glory cloud is not just its scale and immense beauty,’ he says.
‘It’s also that you can go to a specific place at a specific time of the year and be pretty sure you’ll see it. That isn’t something that you find often with clouds, as they rarely stick to appointments.’
Pilot Ken Jellef drives more than 2,500 kilometres from Melbourne each year to surf the clouds in his seemingly fragile microlight. ‘Despite the forces that are at work as this wave rolls along, the air that you are gliding through is as clear as crystal,’ he says. ‘When you look at that enormous flowing wave, with the golden sun breaking behind it, it looks like something the Italians would have painted in the Renaissance. You would swear you were in heaven. It’s that good.’
Riding the unseen wave
Bill Olive knows what it’s like to wipe out on an atmospheric wave. He was caught out by the Morning Glory while it was in its infamous invisible form – when all of the wave’s originating factors are in place, but there isn’t sufficient humidity for cloud to form.
It happened at dawn one day in 1998 at Burketown. Disappointed that no Morning Glory seemed to be forming as the sun rose, he decided instead to take his 77-year-old mother on a gentle sightseeing tour in his powered, two-seater microlight.
Not long into their flight, Bill, from Lake Keepit in northern New South Wales, knew something strange was happening. ‘We were tooling along at 1,000 feet [300 metres] when I saw the altimeter start to go crazy. In no time at all, we were above 2,000 feet [600 metres].’ He realised then that they’d struck an invisible Morning Glory. ‘I called out over my shoulder, “Better hang on Mum – it’s going to get rough!”’
Normally, the cloud itself is a guide to where the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ air is, but Bill was flying blind. ‘From the turbulence, I knew we were heading right into the middle of it, where all the air is counter-rotating. I knew there was probably a sweet spot in there, with a balance between lift and sink, but finding it is impossible, and being in the centre of a 1,000-foot Morning Glory wave is still not where you want to be!’
His tiny craft was buffeted by the swirling air, pitching, rocking and snapping up and down as it streaked along. ‘We suddenly punched through into the downward sink of the wave, and my altimeter went crazy again – this time in reverse... we were in free fall.’
Bill knew that the force of this sinking air spread out as it neared the ground, and that he’d have a thin cushion of air in which to attempt a landing. ‘I saw the saltbush coming up fast and kept the propeller at full power, tilting the wings up to slow us down. We hit, bounced, and hit again, bouncing over the rough ground and saltbush, and then rocking to a stop. It was definitely the roughest landing I’ve ever made.’
Throughout the wild ride, Bill’s elderly mother had been strangely silent. He looked around at her. ‘Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes had a vacant look to them, and her messed hair was maybe a shade whiter,’ Bill says. ‘When I asked her why she’d been so quiet, she said: ‘I didn’t want to interrupt you. You looked far too busy.”’
Barry Slade
May 2010
Growing and building like a mysterious dark force through the thick air of a humid tropical night, the wave picks up the equivalent of an airborne ocean, until by daybreak, it appears as an awesome rolling wave; up to three kilometres high, its front face sheer and ominous, its back a turbulent train. The wave stretches for up to 1,000 kilometres, thundering across the savannah at speeds of 40–60 km/h, sometimes within 100 metres of the ground.
This is the spectacular Morning Glory cloud, an extraordinary meteorological phenomenon found in several places around the world, but not with the same regularity and predictability as it appears near the Gulf of Carpentaria.
‘These are the biggest waves on the planet,’ says Dr Doug Christie, a fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra who conducted rigorous scientific studies on Morning Glories during the 1980s. ‘They have amplitudes of well over a kilometre – sometimes two to three kilometres. That’s a huge wave.’
The phenomenon has increasingly attracted worldwide attention – the 2009 season had two film crews from Japan and another from the USA recording the monster waves.
And since the 1990s, the gliding community has eagerly awaited the Morning Glory season each year. Like the most daring of big-wave surfers, they fly into the path of the oncoming wave and ride up its enormous face, soaring higher and higher, and using its immense power to propel them onwards and upwards.
According to Paul Pulle, a long-term resident of Burketown, Queensland – which has fully formed Morning Glories passing overhead an average of 30 or so times a year – during the peak season (from the beginning of September through to the second week in November), there are usually six gliders on the ground at any one time. ‘This year, there were also hang-gliders, trikes, gyrocopters – it was a real mishmash,’ he says. The pilots travel to the remote town from across Australia and overseas. ‘They’ll come from anywhere.’
Glider pilot Rick Bowie from Byron Bay in New South Wales is one such keen pilot. ‘You can just soar on and on for an hour or more, doing acrobatics, anything you want,’ he says. ‘Meanwhile, the sight of this wave-shaped cloud and its outrageous size are just blowing you away.’
Although different Aboriginal groups have words for Morning Glory clouds, no mythology seems to have developed around them. And surprisingly, for such an incredible phenomenon, they don’t appear in Australia’s post-colonial history until 1934, Christie says. ‘The first reference that I’ve found was in The Bulletin magazine in Sydney – a brief unsigned letter on 12 September 1934, an anonymous correspondent asking a question about the phenomenon.’ One of the next mentions is by RV Deering, a weather officer based at Karumba during the late 1930s.
‘The number of Morning Glories varies quite widely from year to year – it depends on a whole host of factors, such as how much water is on the surface, and when the wet comes,’ Christie says. ‘They occur all year round, but conditions are best in August to November. You certainly will see them in April, May and June. It’s synoptically controlled – meaning there will be five days where you have something, and five days where you don’t. Mostly it depends on when there is a ridge of high pressure over the peninsula and low pressure to the south of Burketown.’
Christie’s research has identified the dangers for pilots at low altitude in northern Australia, particularly in the majority of cases when the intense air wave is created, but conditions aren’t humid enough to form a visible cloud. ‘Often it’s too dry to form the cloud – it will just come through as a wind squall,’ he says. ‘These clear-air ones are more dangerous because pilots can’t see them.’
Pulle says the locals have various ways of predicting whether the clouds will appear in the morning. ‘You get a lot of condensation the night before,’ he says. ‘So if you go to the pub and the fridge doors are fogged up badly, you’ll get one.’ There may also be dew on the roof of the car. ‘It’s just when it’s really high humidity. The temperature is 23°C on the ground and the dew point is also 23°C.’
Christie discovered that there are three ‘families’ of Morning Glory clouds in the region: each have slightly different causes, but all can be active at the same time. One group form and travel from the south and southwest, another group from the southeast, but most are northeasterly to easterlies. They start around 8.30–9pm when a sea breeze from the Coral Sea and another from the Gulf of Carpentaria collide about 300 kilometres south of the tip of Cape York Peninsula in a warm, stable air layer near the ground, some 400–1,200 metres deep.
‘When they collide, the atmosphere is thrown up, and as it sorts itself out, these waves come out,’ Christie says. Moist air from near the ground is lifted up the smooth, leading edge of the wave, then rolls over the back. ‘Sometimes, only one wave is produced, but it can be a series of these things.’ If a series of waves develops, they will be amplitude-ordered, with the biggest wave first.
Around 11pm, the wave rumbles over the remote township of Pormpuraaw (formerly Edward River), about 200 kilometres farther south. ‘They’re quite common at that point,’ Christie says. ‘They haven’t had a chance to deteriorate or run into other weather that might stop them.’
If the pre-dawn weather remains calm and clear, the Morning Glory continues to roll south-southwest, appearing over Burketown in the early morning, where the glider pilots are waiting. The clouds rarely bring rain, but are often associated with a short, intense wind squall near the surface. Morning Glories don’t usually last long – after an hour or so of sun on them, they evaporate.
In 1980, Christie joined the second-ever flight into the path of a Morning Glory in a powered glider. ‘I think it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘It was only 200 metres up and we had come to the front of it – it’s like a sheet of ice that’s just a mountain coming at you.’ The pilot, Russell White, flew straight at it, making a sharp turn just before hitting it. ‘It’s just like going up a steep escalator. The wing was no more than five to ten metres from the face of this thing.’
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, head of the Somerset-based Cloud Appreciation Society UK, has also seen the Morning Glories up close. ‘The remarkable thing about the Morning Glory cloud is not just its scale and immense beauty,’ he says.
‘It’s also that you can go to a specific place at a specific time of the year and be pretty sure you’ll see it. That isn’t something that you find often with clouds, as they rarely stick to appointments.’
Pilot Ken Jellef drives more than 2,500 kilometres from Melbourne each year to surf the clouds in his seemingly fragile microlight. ‘Despite the forces that are at work as this wave rolls along, the air that you are gliding through is as clear as crystal,’ he says. ‘When you look at that enormous flowing wave, with the golden sun breaking behind it, it looks like something the Italians would have painted in the Renaissance. You would swear you were in heaven. It’s that good.’
Riding the unseen wave
Bill Olive knows what it’s like to wipe out on an atmospheric wave. He was caught out by the Morning Glory while it was in its infamous invisible form – when all of the wave’s originating factors are in place, but there isn’t sufficient humidity for cloud to form.
It happened at dawn one day in 1998 at Burketown. Disappointed that no Morning Glory seemed to be forming as the sun rose, he decided instead to take his 77-year-old mother on a gentle sightseeing tour in his powered, two-seater microlight.
Not long into their flight, Bill, from Lake Keepit in northern New South Wales, knew something strange was happening. ‘We were tooling along at 1,000 feet [300 metres] when I saw the altimeter start to go crazy. In no time at all, we were above 2,000 feet [600 metres].’ He realised then that they’d struck an invisible Morning Glory. ‘I called out over my shoulder, “Better hang on Mum – it’s going to get rough!”’
Normally, the cloud itself is a guide to where the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ air is, but Bill was flying blind. ‘From the turbulence, I knew we were heading right into the middle of it, where all the air is counter-rotating. I knew there was probably a sweet spot in there, with a balance between lift and sink, but finding it is impossible, and being in the centre of a 1,000-foot Morning Glory wave is still not where you want to be!’
His tiny craft was buffeted by the swirling air, pitching, rocking and snapping up and down as it streaked along. ‘We suddenly punched through into the downward sink of the wave, and my altimeter went crazy again – this time in reverse... we were in free fall.’
Bill knew that the force of this sinking air spread out as it neared the ground, and that he’d have a thin cushion of air in which to attempt a landing. ‘I saw the saltbush coming up fast and kept the propeller at full power, tilting the wings up to slow us down. We hit, bounced, and hit again, bouncing over the rough ground and saltbush, and then rocking to a stop. It was definitely the roughest landing I’ve ever made.’
Throughout the wild ride, Bill’s elderly mother had been strangely silent. He looked around at her. ‘Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes had a vacant look to them, and her messed hair was maybe a shade whiter,’ Bill says. ‘When I asked her why she’d been so quiet, she said: ‘I didn’t want to interrupt you. You looked far too busy.”’
Barry Slade
May 2010
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