Australian Weather Calendar

paints cloud streets - Sunset highlights streets of stratocumulus over Buninyong, central Victoria.

Picture: Mr Keith Day

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It's a long photographic journey from covering the sinking of HMS Antelope during the Falklands war of 1982 to capturing the serenity of a sunset over a former Victorian goldfield. In 1982 Keith Day, Portsmouth-born, was a 16-year-old Able Seaman in the Royal Navy, and a photographic enthusiast. Today he's Communications Advisor with the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, a partnership between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. Keith lives with his partner Chase and their seven horses on a property at Mt Egerton, not far from Buninyong, scene of one of the great 19th Century gold rushes. He was feeding horses late on a February evening in 2007 at a property in Buninyong when the colours on the cloud layers over the old Durham Lead goldfields started changing. Fortunately he always keeps a camera handy.

A keen photographer since schooldays, he still laughs at the memory of his mother's face when his upstairs darkroom sink overflowed into the lounge below. During the disastrous Victorian 'Black Saturday' bushfires in 2009, he was a Country Fire Authority volunteer. Sales of his photo of an injured horse in blackened paddocks raised more than $1000 for the bushfire appeal.

Keith is a member of the Creswick Light Horse Troop and often participates in Light Horse re-enactments, including ANZAC day parades in the Ballarat area and at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. Recently he dressed as a French Standard Bearer, accompanying 'Napoleon' to the National Gallery of Victoria to publicise a major exhibition. Two of his horses are descendants of the famous 'Walers' which provided hundreds of thousands of remounts to the British Army. Undulating or wavelike clouds can develop in a variety of situations.

When the wind is relatively constant with height and the upper atmosphere is more stable than lower levels, clouds can appear in rows parallel to the wind direction. Air cools as it rises from the surface forming clouds, then is forced to descend as it reaches a more stable layer, generating a rolling motion in the atmosphere that can be seen as cloud streets.