Sunsets on the Plains best amaze me with a towering supercell spinning through the warming light, casting crepusculars and their intervening shadows. A "ring of Saturn" anvil rim only made the scene more stunning. Then, just a few minutes later, a vertical view at sunset offered a perspective that was similar, but also dramatically different. The storm along the Oklahoma/Kansas line would move … [Read more...]
Search Results for: crepuscular
Panhandle Anticrepuscular Rays
Anticrepuscular rays converge on the east-southeast to southeast horizon during northern-hemispheric sunsets near summer solstice. In this film slide, anvil material is seen overhead at left, spewing off a supercell behind me to the northwest. The distant pink thunderhead at lower right was over 100 miles away—a supercell which would produce a tornado after dark southeast of Wichita Falls. 5 … [Read more...]
Crepuscular Spray
We had zigzagged up the dryline from the Texas Panhandle, observing one potentially promising area of convective towers after another form, deepen, then wither from dry entertainment. This was no exception, but did occur late enough to offer this delightful spray pattern of crepuscular rays, along with a partial cloud shadow around the small anvil. Had this been the end of the chase day, we … [Read more...]
Little Contrail and Crepusculars
This short contrail sublimated rapidly behind an airplane crossing above a field of crepuscular rays, as seen from the west lawn of the National Weather Center. I used "sublimated" instead of "evaporated", because even as hot and moist as the engine exhaust was, its condensation crystallized to ice within a second or two in the surrounding bitter-cold air of double digit below zero (F). The ice … [Read more...]
Anticrepuscular Storm Shadow
A big supercell to the north (left) cast one of the best-defined storm shadows I've seen, rendering a crisp edge to some of the last moments of late-afternoon sunshine. The shadow line is the same one seen at the top of this nearly simultaneous shot of the business end of the storm. This is also a marvelous manifestation of anticrepuscular (a.k.a. postcrepuscular) rays, which appear above the … [Read more...]
Downward-Pointing Crepusculars
We often see crepuscular rays with an apparent upward aim. In this case, the chunky young anvil from a nascent supercell spread across that part of the sky containing the sun, part of which can be seen through a hole in the cloud. As with other crepusculars, the rays actually are parallel, but seem to spread away from each other due to a bit of optical trickery: our brain's (or the camera's) … [Read more...]
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