Above and beyond a roadside cluster of brilliant Indian paintbrush flowers, the sunset painted mammatus clouds on the back side of a storm complex. It was the ideal way to cap a somewhat convoluted but photographically fruitful chase day that began with an initial stop just outside downtown Oklahoma City. Rush Springs OK (8 May 26) Looking NNE 34.77, -97.9605 … [Read more...]
Cooler Road
After undercutting the anchor storm, this blast of cool outflow swept further ahead of the southern part of a squall line. In the process, the turbulent "whale's mouth" formation atop the surging cold pool made a scenic, pleasant, almost painting-like cloudscape-landscape combination, the second one of this sort I had encountered the same month. 3 NNW Ringgold TX (15 Apr 26) Looking … [Read more...]
Supercell Towers, Southern Flint Hills
The southernmost Flint Hills extend from Kansas into much of central and western Osage County, OK, before petering out near the Arkansas River. This supercell crossed them after producing a couple of tornadoes, including a nice thick pipe, and its later satellite vortex that I saw, but not in time to capture on e-film. Incidentally, this view was only a couple miles from where I saw another … [Read more...]
Stout Tube in Osage County
After shooting the broader view of the Shidler tornado, I switched to the zoom camera, which definitely came in handy on this day, not just for photographing the tornado, but for viewing changes in its visual structure at this distance. Here, it assumed its widest form -- a classical, tilted, thick "stovepipe" look. 2 SSE Shidler OK (26 Apr 26) Looking NNE 34.7462, -96.6524 … [Read more...]
Undercutting the Anchor Storm
At the tail end of a squall line, an anchoring supercell that merged in with the line survived for a reasonably long time...until I showed up. Forthwith, the storms up the line shot out a belt of outflow, topped by a classic shelf cloud. The outflow undercut the supercell, and the entire line got messy for about an hour before backbuilding. We often see "Tail-End Charlie" storms attached to … [Read more...]
Shidler Cone and Towers
A young but mature supercell, with a large and promising updraft base, moving into progressively larger hodographs, took its sweet time to produce a tornado over the open country of the southwesternmost Flint Hills in Oklahoma. Yet finally it did, while moving into a large road void past Shidler. The mesocyclone was so strongly tilted that the tornado occurred in the main updraft, but vertcially … [Read more...]
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