Fall-blooming waterside wildflowers reflected beautifully on a Ouachita Mountains lake. This looked like the perfect place to pop a topwater lure across the water lilies and haul out a frog-slammin' hoss bass, but alas, no such fish fell to such splashy temptations. Instead it was time to be content with the natural beauty of the place and the moment, which was more than fine enough. 3 NNW … [Read more...]
North Rim Jolt
A dark desert storm delivered a 30,000-ampere parting kiss to the North Rim, as it headed southeast across the 5,000-foot-deep chasm of the Grand Canyon. Add up several million of these thunderstorms for flooding rains, along with about as many freeze-thaw cycles, and a turbulent major river. That's how a high, nearly flat plateau gets carved into wondrous and majestic forms like this in a … [Read more...]
Sidestepping Sizzlers
This was one of the last few visible cloud-to-ground events from a weakening, west-southwestward-moving storm cluster that had moved off the higher terrain east of Phoenix and north of Tucson. In real time, these two discharges flickered quickly, but not simultaneously, appearing to sidestep each other. Their thunder was one continuous report resonating for a long time across the desert … [Read more...]
Triple Tail Cloud
A triple tail cloud is not to be confused with the saltwater "tripletail" fish. Though those are fun on the hook, and hard fighters for their size, I prefer this kind of "catch". For as many supercells as I've witnessed, this much discrete tail-cloud banding has been extraordinarily rare—and combined with such great length, it was unique. The remarkable storm formed in southeastern Colorado, … [Read more...]
Bitter Cold Sunrise at Battlestar Norman
One of the coldest mornings in decades dawned with solidly subzero temperatures, snow cover, and anthropomorphic, convective "steam" clouds rising from unseen HVAC vents into the light of the rising sun. Because of a pandemic and the time of day, very few people were working in-office anyway, save for a handful of forecasters and security personnel stationed at the National Weather Center (a.k.a. … [Read more...]
Twilight Supercell and Big Midlevel Funnel
A sky kaleidoscope flashed forth, when a bit of lightning erupted in the upper-level updraft-to-anvil transition area of a supercell. The low-precipitation supercell had offered a splendid sunset scene, and now spun up likely the largest (relative to storm size) midlevel funnel cloud I have seen. Meanwhile, a "ring of Saturn" cloud band skirted the midlevel updraft, nicely collaring the … [Read more...]
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