The Lorenz attractor in the sky

The photo taken in Derbyshire, England, on a cold January morning in 2022 shows long parallel "cylinders" of clouds between two layers of air at slightly different temperatures. The long cylinders roll, very slowly, in a manner modelled, approximately, by the Lorenz equations.

At certain temperature & pressure differences between the layers of air the direction of the rolling movement will be chaotic.

The particular direction of rolling at any one point in time will depend on the exact influence of earlier particular "flaps of butterfly wings" (& all wings, in fact). Edward Lorenz described the sensitivity of the clouds' particular position or rotation to an earlier condition as the butterfly effect.