An ice-encased set of green tree leaves offers a beautiful spectacle of natural artwork, painted in part by the gravity that pulled leaves down as ice deepened and icicles extended, causing them to bend into claw shapes. Leaves still on trees are bad news in an ice storm; they supply far more ice weight to a tree than when branches are bare, and as we saw with this event, bust many of them apart … [Read more...]
Towering Cumulus on the Dryline
This is a much different breed of towering cumulus than the maritime version from nine months later and over a thousand miles southeast. Here, unlike on a land-breeze circulation, the low-middle level flow was strongly sheared, causing the tilt. The cloud looks less robust than the previous example because it was drawing in dry air from west of the dryline, on which it formed. This dry … [Read more...]
Ice Beads on Spider Web
Even amidst great destruction, such as wrought by the October 2020 central Oklahoma ice storm, one can find beauty and astonishment in little places. The engineering marvel of a spider web, rendered taut by holding a bigger ice chunk unseen off lower right, displayed frozen necklace beads of ice while freezing rain still was falling. The images rendered through the beads inverted land and sky, … [Read more...]
Millions of Drips
The title is how this scene came together, 600 feet under the limestone scrublands of the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico. Every one of these fluidly sculptured columns has been a drip line of calcified water for millennia, slowly building down and up until the conjoining of stalactites with stalagmites. The artwork is far from finished. 4 W Whites City NM (9 Jun 14) … [Read more...]
Little but Lively
Rotating with a fervor I seldom had witnessed before in my young life, this small, scuddy and tightly circulating wall cloud looked and acted like it was going to produce a tornado any second. The elongated scud chunk to its lower left formed, rose helically and merged up into the wall cloud, all in less than 10 seconds. Alas, it was the late 1980s in Oklahoma, and the tornado simply refused to … [Read more...]
Future Fossils?
Hail landed in the mud and melted about 18 hours before this photo, leaving well-defined impressions which quite accurately documented the size of the hailstones. This sort of record, when available, certainly beats the usual overestimates of hail size provided by excited spotters who seldom witness (and even more seldom measure) large hail. Perhaps, somewhere in the world, semi-spheric cavities … [Read more...]
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