Several interesting effects happened here to create this peculiar sight. First, it was late in the afternoon, with the sun obliquely to the left; so warm colors got refracted through a large amount of cloud material and precipitation. The storm responsible was a classic supercell that had scorched numerous spots along the ground, and in its path, with hot bolts of lightning from its anvil. … [Read more...]
Forked CGs
Simple but beautiful, forked CG (cloud-to-ground) strokes hit one behind the other. If your camera has a "B" (bulb) setting, taking lightning pictures is as easy as putting the camera firmly on a tripod (make sure it is level!), aiming it at the part of the storm where lightning is most common, and holding down the trigger with a finger or release cable until the flash occurs. Lightning takes … [Read more...]
Wintertime Wall Cloud
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...]
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