A supercell that formed in Montana—just north of an outflow-reinforced warm front—continued to cloak itself behind a deck of warm-advection clouds, including intermittent areas of asperatus, spitting occasional CG lightning, while churning southeastward across the northeastern corner of Wyoming. Take out the northern Plains landscape, and swap in one with more, taller trees, and this could be a … [Read more...]
Stratocumulus under Cirrus, Dallas
Two days before a historic solar eclipse, the late-afternoon "Golden Hour" painted its reflective presence across the ever-majestic Dallas skyline, beneath a deeply layered sky of scattered low stratocumulus clouds and a broken deck of high cirrus, with a couple contrails streaked through for good measure. Almost 16 years earlier, I was right under the nearest notch of the tallest building, … [Read more...]
Bradshaw Wide View with Structure
As the Bradshaw tornado pulled away northward, the last in a chain of closely spaced, tornadic, dryline supercells came into fuller view, with its classical rear-flank convective and gust-frontal structure. The scene at this stage looked strikingly like one from a NSSL slide of the Alfalfa, OK tornado on 22 May 1981, which I long had admired for its combination of tornado and textbook context. … [Read more...]
Crepuscular Highlight
Storm intercepts sometimes involve time spent waiting on activity to organize, whether or not it ever does. We could have called this chase a bust when the storms never could stay healthy on the Plains after leaving the background Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We could have given up, headed toward the next day's target area in eastern Colorado, and missed this. However, as if a message from … [Read more...]
Road and Cloud Curves
Another beautiful end to a chase day found me a mile up a High Plains dirt road, over a hill, out of sight of the main highway, in the company of nothing but western meadowlarks, fresh cool outflow, and the departing complex of thunderstorms that produced it. I wanted to pitch camp here, but already had a non-refundable reservation at a favorite motel in Burlington for the night. Instead, I … [Read more...]
Grass Fire Advancing
Zooming in even further to this lightning-started Colorado prairie fire made it seem as if the inferno were practically next to my vehicle, threatening to engulf it. [I could feel some radiative heat, even though it was nowhere nearly as close as this looks in reality.] Good thing zoom lenses serve useful as well as artistic purposes! That said, a slight wind shift toward the inflow region of … [Read more...]
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