Prior to producing its first tornado, a supercell got better organized, with a large updraft base preceding a growing wall cloud. This is a quintessential southwestern Oklahoma scene, the sparse vegetation of a semiarid climate interspersed with exposed areas of red-clay soil on either side of the primitive road. In wetter conditions, this path would be deeply rutted, extremely slick … [Read more...]
Young Supercell behind Abandoned Farmhouse
Organizing into a supercell, this young storm made a fine backdrop for an abandoned farmhouse whose sheet-metal roof clattered and banged back and forth in the moist southeasterly breezes. The storm would move NE across the rolling red-dirt plains of southwestern Oklahoma, before merging with a younger cell and assuming a spectacular bell shape. 3 E Hollis OK (18 Mar 12) Looking WSW 34.6825, … [Read more...]
Warm-Frontal Tornadic Supercell: Wide View
After several zoomed-in photos of the first Conlen tornado, I quickly grabbed the other camera for a wide view, during a bowl-shaped condensation phase that immediately preceded the tornado's demise. Supercells on the immediate cool side of a warm front still may access surface-based instability, as this one obviously did by spawning tornadoes, but tend to have thicker intervening low clouds, … [Read more...]
Chaotic Convective Cloudscape
As often happens in these parts, convection that blew up hours before in the higher mountains north of I-10 aggregated together, with the collective outflow rushing into a well-heated boundary layer on the desert floor. That, in turn, set off more thunderstorms, which pulsated the outflow/convective cycle along well southward into the borderlands. Dust raised readily from the dry lake bed west … [Read more...]
Mixed Sleet and Freezing Drizzle
This was the result of the lighter second round of a two-day, two-episode, mostly sleet event for central Oklahoma. Behind a scene this seemingly dreary, fascinating precip-phase and coalescence processes played out! A few hours of freezing drizzle occurred, with a very brief, late and light episode of sleet, some of which stuck to the conterminously accreting ice layer. Unlike most sleet, … [Read more...]
Sleet, Not Snow
All of what looks like snow here was actually sleet! Sometimes it seems that sleet (ice pellets) is the default winter-precipitation mode in these parts, given its occurrence in many of our winter-weather episodes. Still, an all-sleet event like this is uncommon, and was still ongoing with nearly an inch accumulated. Sleet consists of solid little ice balls, which are raindrops that freeze … [Read more...]
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