One of my most offbeat scenes as a storm observer appeared in west-central Kansas. A former supercell, blowing upscale into a raging line of severe storms with a menacing and strongly forced arcus cloud, didn't need any help sustaining itself. Nevertheless, this center-pivot machine offered some. Not enough to matter anyway, mind you...the storm processed millions of times more water by volume, … [Read more...]
Sparkin’ Behind the Farmhouse
Three closely spaced, deeply and intricately branched lightning discharges, in quick succession, divided the darkness and split the silence beyond a west Texas farmhouse. During a drought year, and in a part of the state usually thirsty of crop and livestock, the hazard posed by the lightning was worth the accompanying hundreds of square miles of beneficial rainfall relief. 1 SE Aspermont TX (7 … [Read more...]
Supercell Outflow Dominance
"Outflow-dominant" isn't a popular term anymore with respect to supercells, but I don't care. I'm using it. This was one. That is why. A supercell can be outflow-dominant and still maintain an existence, albeit a tenuous one, as most such storms ultimately lose a direct vertical pipeline of surface-based inflow air and either shrivel, merge with nearby storms and expand upscale into a wind … [Read more...]
Almost
On the first supercell of the day that I intercepted, a broad, scuddy, poorly defined wall cloud narrowed and tightened up noticeably just a mile or two to my west, about the time a radar-based tornado warning was issued. It assumed a tilted, somewhat conical shape with peak low-level rotation strength right at this time, and I was watching the ground beneath closely for evidence of debris that … [Read more...]
Transitions
A storm evolving from a nearly tornadic supercell to an outflow-driven multicell passed over an uneven landscape transitioning from the southeastern Great Plains to the northwestern Hill Country, during the change from day to night. Right before sunset, the filtered warm rays caught the inner rim of a shelf cloud that still had convective elements, thanks to a remnant midlevel mesocyclone still … [Read more...]
Brownwood Fooler
The year's second trek to the Edwards Plateau and Hill Country (still more to come in June) yielded a big, messy supercell that passed right over Brownwood, with baseball-sized hail and separate measured gusts of 65 and 64 knots, 13 minutes apart. While trying to stay ahead of the gnarly storm, which seemed increasingly outflow-dominant, I made a wrong turn southeast instead of east in town. … [Read more...]
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