Caught this over my house earlier. At first, i figured it was just some weirdly shaped jet trail, so i didn't think much of it and went inside to make a peanut butter and sugar sandwich (i don't like jam, just plain peanut butter and sugar).

When i came back out like 15 minutes later, it had moved a little bit across the sky, but it hadn't smudged at all. It just faded a tiny bit. Usually, those contrails turn into a blurry mess in five minutes, but these 60 degree angles stayed perfectly sharp. It looked like a giant, rigid lattice hanging there.

I actually checked a flight tracker right after i took the video because i was so confused. There were a couple of planes in the general area, but nothing was even close to the flight path of where this cloud was sitting. Plus, the wind was moving West, and the only plane nearby was heading South. It doesn't line up at all. Definitely not a contrail.

I looked into the Cloud Appreciation Society to see if they had a category for it, or even suggest a cloud that isn't on there, but that place is a joke. You have to pay a membership fee just to join the "club", and it feels like they only care about clouds that look like 19th century paintings. Just all gatekeeping. If it's not officially recognized, they act like it doesn't exist.

I know people are going to say "wind shear" or "gravity waves", but I've looked at photos of those. They're wavy or blurry. This was a perfect, repeating 60-degree geometric grid. It looked structural, not like random wind.

I'm making up a name, "Cirrus fractalis", or "Fractal Cirrus", for now because i genuinely don't know what else to call it. I'm almost 100% sure it's a new cloud type, because everything i see online is unrelated junk.

The reason this can't be wind shear or a drifting contrail is the lack of diffusion. I'm pretty sure i'm not talking out of my other end here, but i'll try explaining it. In physics, if wind is strong enough to shape a cloud into a grid, it's also strong enough to blur the edges of the ice crystals. This stayed razor-sharp for the entire 30 minutes. It behaved more like a solid cloud structure than a gas or vapor that moves and blows away. The 60 degree triangular grid didn't warp as it drifted, which means the grid is part of the cloud's actual type, not just a random shape the wind blew it into.

And for the people saying it was just "perfect laminar flow" or stable air, because i know some people will say that, it definitely wasn't. There was a lot of turbulence in the lower layers today. I could see the lower cumulus clouds literally getting shredded and rolling around in the wind. Usually, when the lower atmosphere is that messy, the upper layers aren't a perfect sheet of glass either. I even checked my weather app and it showed high-altitude turbulence/wind shear alerts for the whole afternoon, so the "stable air" excuse doesn't even work. The fact that this grid stayed locked and rigid while the rest of the sky was clearly churning is exactly why i'm saying it's a structural cloud type. It didn't rip apart like some piece of paper, i guess.

If you work at any weather company or similar, can you please consider adding this?

It stayed visible for almost half an hour before it finally got too thin to see. Has anyone else seen the sky be in a pattern like this? I managed to get a quick video before it faded too much.

Link to the raw files: [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H1d5iNOMr0D3YfTKFPII0hxe-QwD6UpU?usp=drive\_link](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H1d5iNOMr0D3YfTKFPII0hxe-QwD6UpU?usp=drive_link)

Is there a name for this? These triangles stayed sharp for like 30 mins