This had been a difficult storm intercept day: watching a couple of promising looking supercells die, dodging an extremely intense bow echo, and getting caught in a separate, nasty core of heavy rain, hail and damaging wind that made us feel as if we were stuck in front of a giant fire hose. We let the "fire hose" pass over both us and the nearby town of Mineral Wells, then on a whim and a … [Read more...]
Turquoise Fort Portals
The same Caribbean-blue waters that offer such a beautiful tonal contrast through Fort Jefferson's embrasures also will contribute to its ultimate, if gradual, crumble to ruin, without major measures of maintenance. Hurricanes and other storms fueled by the high oceanic heat content of the nearby Gulf and Caribbean will wear the structure down through wind, waves, salt spray, and the effective … [Read more...]
Sunset Sky off Southwest Florida
We started the daylight hours with cool, windswept, dry-land horizons in Oklahoma, and ended it here, admiring the final sunlight light illuminating high clouds on an unobstructed view far out across the eastern Gulf of Mexico. This was a mighty welcomed direction of travel for November, I must declare. Bonita Springs FL (6 Nov 15) Looking WSW 26.3322, -81.8466 … [Read more...]
Not a Tornado!
At the time I shot this slide, I remarked on video that this cloud might be reported wrongly as a tornado. Not 5 minutes later, it happened: A tornado warning came over my weather radio for its location eastward, based on "several spotter reports of a tornado." It was actually a large, low-hanging, non-rotating chunk of cloud material along an inflow/outflow interface in the distance, … [Read more...]
Stratus or Fog?
To answer the question the title poses: yes! On this chilly, moist morning in downtown Wichita, the fuzzy base of the stratus deck engulfed the tops of the buildings, but became fog at ground level, some indeterminate distance northward. Drizzle also fell at this time and location, which is common in foggy boundary layers under strong low-level warm-advection regimes. Wichita KS (10 Feb 19) … [Read more...]
Cumulonimbus and Backshear
The backshear is a protrusion of a multicell thunderhead's anvil "backward" into and against the upper level winds, which were blowing from the left (SW) in this case. The stronger the flow, the more powerful the updraft needed to shove cloud material against that wind. Also, a big "knuckle"—common storm-enthusiast slang for upside-down moist convective towers—can be seen next to the notch, … [Read more...]
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