A cold, calm dawn casts a warm sky glow behind the blackjacks, post oaks and black walnut trees of the Western Crosstimbers belt. These trees had been broken by a weak tornado and two ice storms in the preceding five years. Then their dormant, living remains, rendered jagged and forlorn in visual form by the arboreal nakedness of wintertime, silhouetted a deck of sun-splashed … [Read more...]
Flanking-Line Tornado near Sunset
But, but, but...where's the tornado? Not all tornadoes are obvious at first glance, even when there's no precipitation or terrain interfering with the line of sight. Can you, diligent spotter, locate not just the ground circulation but the one at cloud base from just this two-dimensional image? Click the image to expand. The smudge of debris at lower center defines the ground contact of the … [Read more...]
Shelf Tiers over Northwest Texas
While the southern end of this squall line spat sparks at travelers, the northern part (evolved from a former supercell) graced the skies with an assortment of bands, tiers and rippled edges. Wild outflow formations such as this never disappoint in their uniqueness and creative fluid artistry. They also can herald dangerously severe wind. Conventional and West Texas Mesonet stations sampled three … [Read more...]
Sunset Personality 5: Edge Zoom
[Part 5 of 5] Even when a sunset is winding down, seemingly well past peak color, with only ghostly remnants of past brilliance fading away over most of the sky, don't pack up and leave quite yet! Look around, and far away: amazing sights still may be there. In this instance, the remaining colorful scenery revealed itself by a deep zoom into the same cloud-shield edge that was a distant yellow … [Read more...]
Sunset Personality 4: Southwestern Shadow and Light
[Part 4 of 5] When the heretofore brilliant northwestern sky, in the sunsets' direction, began to be obscured in shadow, we basked instead in the orange glow from alternating areas of light reflecting off a large, fuzzy area of mammatus to the southwest. Soft, yet deeply textured, this scene could have been from a different day's sunset, yet materialized within mere minutes of the others in this … [Read more...]
Sunset Personality 3: Golden Mammatus
[Part 3 of 5] A long-lived and large arc of thunderstorms had moved over central Oklahoma several hours prior, and still was going strong as it crossed parts of southeastern Oklahoma and north Texas. Thriving off of a rich Gulf air mass to its south, with surface dew points in the 70s (F), the resulting cold pool still was forcing a large swath of that moist air mass into intense updrafts aloft, … [Read more...]
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