What had been a rather unremarkable and short-distance storm observing trip by day turned unexpectedly spectacular by night, thanks to the merging of several multicell and weak supercell thunderstorms into a small but cohesive cluster. The lightning was sporadic on this evening, however, and often evaded my slide camera’s open shutter. A few other equally grand displays either began or ended too far out of the field of view. Fortunately, this one erupted shortly before I had decided to leave, and filled a large sector of the sky with brilliant, moving light. Flickering tendrils of electricity “crawled” along the bottom of the anvil cloud canopy, quite true to the nickname. Such discharges actually are rather common on the upshear (back) side of convective complexes. Viewing and photography of crawlers, however, often gets handicapped or prevented outright by low clouds, lingering rain, the threat of a rogue cloud-to-ground strike nearby…or the actual occurrence of one when no threat had been perceived before!
2 SSW Pauls Valley OK (8 May 5) Looking SE
34.7169, -97.2277Anvil Crawlers
What had been a rather unremarkable and short-distance storm observing trip by day turned unexpectedly spectacular by night, thanks to the merging of several multicell and weak supercell thunderstorms into a small but cohesive cluster. The lightning was sporadic on this evening, however, and often evaded my slide camera’s open shutter. A few other equally grand displays either began or ended too far out of the field of view. Fortunately, this one erupted shortly before I had decided to leave, and filled a large sector of the sky with brilliant, moving light. Flickering tendrils of electricity “crawled” along the bottom of the anvil cloud canopy, quite true to the nickname. Such discharges actually are rather common on the upshear (back) side of convective complexes. Viewing and photography of crawlers, however, often gets handicapped or prevented outright by low clouds, lingering rain, the threat of a rogue cloud-to-ground strike nearby…or the actual occurrence of one when no threat had been perceived before!
2 SSW Pauls Valley OK (8 May 5) Looking SE
34.7169, -97.2277