This was a great way to start a monsoonal chase day—after a delicious lunch with frozen custard in far southeast Tucson, while watching the towers develop. The biggest of those early convective piles became this young cumulonimbus, thrusting its sharp, symmetric, hat-shaped form into a crystal-blue southern Arizona sky, enticing and inviting closer inspection right down the highway. The … [Read more...]
Why Weather
Early in the 2021 monsoonal excursion, I had a few whiffs on getting sunset or evening lightning, but finally found one small, dying cell that somehow spit a little electricity into the sunset light near Why. Why? Why ask why? Just go to Why. Why? Why not? 7 SE Why AZ (2 Jul 21) Looking NW 32.2138, -112.6322 … [Read more...]
Deadly Elegance
These are just three of nearly 80 cloud-to-ground strikes I captured from this spot on a marvelously electrified (albeit sometimes very dusty) Arizona night, as a series of cores passed southwestward across the field of view to my north through west. Any one of these elegantly patterned channels of plasma could kill any living thing beneath, instantly. This is why lightning safety is important, … [Read more...]
36 Years After
Thirty-six years prior, that blown-out mountain back there mowed down this log, and millions of others, in a searing inferno of boiling-hot, debris-filled, EF5-tornado-strength wind survivable by no living thing. Many of these logs remain well-preserved because they were deeply sandblasted by fine, hot silica particles jammed with fierce force into every pore. Was this "weather damage"? You … [Read more...]
Every Which Way
This thunderstorm nearly had exhausted its lightning production by the time I got set up, but one of its last bursts was something special. To the eye, it was a bright but blinky flash of less than two seconds, with what appeared to be spectacular electrical spaghetti in more of the sky than my view. To the wide-angle camera lens, it was an intricate, complicated and multi-directional electrical … [Read more...]
Campo-21 Wide
To an avid storm observer, a nicely developed Great Plains supercell is akin to a delicious upside-down cake. A tornado is uncommon and just a "cherry on top"—or in this case, a cone on the bottom (right). In this wide-angle perspective west of Campo, CO, the tornado was widening and weakening at this point, after being a fairly stout, tall tube within its cage of rain and hail. Though this … [Read more...]
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