An elongated wall cloud rotated slowly but rather asymmetrically, seemingly trading areas of more-concentrated turning for a few minutes until the entire mesocyclone area began to be undercut by the storm's forward-flank outflow (coming in from the right). In the meantime, scud in the tail cloud at right moved fairly rapidly inward (right to left). On a cool yet unstable day when low-topped, … [Read more...]
Forks of Fury
Although this weakening, formerly tornadic storm no longer posed a tornado threat, it still produced sporadic lightning flashes, including a few tall, forked blasts from the middle to upper levels. Even though we were farther away than it appears here, thanks to the handiness of zoom lenses, a deep, protracted report of thunder reverberated across the northwest Texas landscape with each such … [Read more...]
Hail in Fallen Leaves
After producing a funnel cloud farther west near Grand Lake, the Afton supercell crossed the Missouri border and moved deeper into the Ozarks. With its environment and the terrain both becoming less favorable, I let the storm go, cutting northward behind it to see what hail it had dropped. As expected for a cold-core supercell in the winter, it produced copious amounts of small hail, drifted … [Read more...]
Specimen of Beauty
[Part 3 of 3] The HP supercell began to weaken as I got farther southeast, getting ahead of the storm again it angled likewise. But the curved cold outflow (left), the mesocyclone at center, and the tail feature (former flank) at right, acted like a miniature version of the cold front, low, and warm front structure of big synoptic cyclones. It isn't too hard to imagine a weather map with those … [Read more...]
Rotating Interface
[Part 2 of 3] As the southeast-moving HP supercell's path and mine converged, the shelf cloud structures cleared away enough so that I could more closely examine the structure along the inflow-outflow interface. This ragged wall cloud—part of a mesocyclone at the northern apex of the storm's rear-flank gust front—was slowly rotating. Meanwhile, hail over 2.5 inches in diameter pummeled the … [Read more...]
Happy Union HP
[Part 1 of 3] At first glance, this looks like a big, mean-looking shelf cloud belonging in the Gallery of Outflow. But look closer at the structures in this 28-mm wide-angle shot. Outflow at left and inflow at right are actually dancing a mesocyclonic tango. The HP (heavy-precipitation) supercell's main precipitation core is at lower left (NNW), sending outflow eastward (from left to right) … [Read more...]
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