The North Texas sky in May never fails to include the supercell: an organized, rotating, twisted, tilted column of moist air many miles high, processing millions of tons of air per minute at upward speeds nearing 100 mph, and a prolific producer of severe hail, damaging wind, and sometimes even tornadoes. The flags’ direction and uprightness gives a hint as to why the storm is there, and why … [Read more...]
Whale’s Mouth Tornado
We had finished watching a "landspout" fest from a line of thunderstorms that was becoming outflow dominant, and drove east a few miles through light to moderate rain to catch back up to the gust front, when my passenger yelled about a tornado to our south. Sure enough, as I pulled to a stop, a faint column of rotating spray and dust was visible out his window, under the tip of a condensation … [Read more...]
Cornhusker State Orphan Anvil
"The good life" somehow evaded this dying gasp of deep convection just north of the Kansas/Nebraska border, as seen from right on the state line. Storm observers often refer to these cloud formations, whereby a small anvil and fuzzy, rainy remnant of a low- to middle-level updraft are all that remains, as "little orphan anvils." The linked image is a literal textbook archetype that I shot on … [Read more...]
Rotating Fury
On its 175-mile trail of damage from just southeast of Amarillo to the Haskell-Munday corridor, this fearsome, fast-moving, but beautiful supercell underwent several marvelous metamorphoses. Here, it presents a layered mothership structure with stunning turquoise chambers between, while racing southeastward at 50 mph between Childress and Paducah. This storm wasn't something to take lightly. It … [Read more...]
Blue-Hour Wall Cloud and Funnel
Late-day supercells that form on "cooked" old outflow boundaries can do interesting things in twilight or after dark, including (sometimes) tornadoes. I targeted the boundary between Aspermont and Dickens partly for that reason, and partly because it was the easiest to reach. This was as close as it came to paying off while there was still daylight, about 15 minutes after sunset in the "blue … [Read more...]
Storm-Day Conclusion
Breaks in midlevel clouds, lingering beneath the disintegrating rear part of anvil material from a dying storm cluster, made a great sunset-hour finale to an otherwise relatively mundane northeastern Colorado chase day. The storms hadn't had much structure and were rather high-based and fuzzy, so I certainly welcomed this delightful show before heading back into nearby Sterling for the night. … [Read more...]
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