Occasional wisps of condensation or spray swirled upward from the soaked ground beneath this increasingly rain-wrapped tornado—the last visible vestiges of a persistent and ominously photogenic circulation in the supercell's farthest western rear area. 5 N Channing TX (18 May 10) Looking N 35.7544, -102.3211 RADAR … [Read more...]
Ragged Rotation
We had been positioned within a couple miles of this spot for nearly an hour as a supercell approached, watching mostly disorganized wall clouds come and go with no more than weak rotation. A larger, newer mesocyclone was forming farther east, as the parent supercell moved into richer moisture, but we stayed a little longer. This was why: an older, occluded circulation seemed to latch onto more … [Read more...]
A Sterling Sunset
Combine a sporadically cloudy western area where the light originates, and deeply textured, multi-layered eastern view of rain, storm clouds, and scud, all bouncing photons every which way, yielding layers of direct and diffused sunset light and partial, cool-toned shadowing. The result? A splash of pastels hurled across the sky in the form of a fluid, abstract painting. What a privilege and … [Read more...]
Smoky Supercell with Older Sibling
This was not only a weird scene, but one with a lot happening. As the "Roswell Mothership" storm shrunk a little and raised its cloud base, it still remained decidedly surface-based. We know this because it can be seen here at right, ingesting a plume of smoke from a grass fire that had been started by its own lightning. That, combined with some subtle differences in cloud shadowing, cast a … [Read more...]
CG and Anvil Crawlers
Decades later, this is still one of my all-time personal favorites, mainly because of the variety of lightning on display: a split-channel CG strike, along with a mixture of connected and disconnected "anvil crawlers." These natural pyrotechnics blazed through a region of light rain trailing a mesoscale convective system (MCS), which was moving SSE away from the scene. There is no place better … [Read more...]
Multicell Storm from Torrington – 2
Intense, tilted, twin updraft plumes pumped countless kilotons of moisture into a storm complex along the Wyoming-Nebraska state line, just a few minutes after the last shot. It was well worth a delay in dinner. Even though we were getting rather hungry for tangible food, this magnificent rampart of convective resplendence was satiating our annual (and ceaselessly voracious) springtime appetite … [Read more...]
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