Our friendly little lightning-ignited prairie fire stayed well away from man-made structures, and in doing so, performed a service by reducing overgrown, dead grass to ash for enriching the soil. It's no coincidence: freshly burned areas grow greenest, especially out here and when getting enough rain (which isn't a given). The flame front, at right, must have hit an especially volatile and … [Read more...]
High Shelf
Yesterday spotting a tornado south of Midland, today viewing an arcus within a few miles of Colorado—such is the road life of the itinerant storm observer! While this "day between the days" didn't grace the viewfinder with another spectacular supercell, it gave residents of northeastern New Mexico some much-welcomed rain, and me a picturesque, congenially stormy High Plains scene … [Read more...]
Auroral Glow over Norman
Although not the main auroral show for the night (that was a vivid salmon-red band to the south), the rest of the central Oklahoma sky to its poleward side assumed varying levels of magenta to turquoise-tinted glow that doesn't happen on other nights not so hypercharged in the upper atmosphere by solar activity. The deeper reddish part at right graded into the bright glow that arched across the … [Read more...]
Wrapping yet Dusty
How can a tornado be wrapping in rain, yet covered in (and surrounded by) so much dust? The dust came first. Though not necessarily obvious from this perspective, a good deal of the wrapping rain also was outside the dust at this point, though some was intermingled, since the precip cascade below cloud base was relatively young. What fell over the next few minutes, in the hook, was a muddy … [Read more...]
Mammatus over Missouri
Fortunate to find one of the few flat, open areas of north-central Missouri, I found that this marvelous scene and some later crawler lightning rewarded all the time, effort and expense to get to this point in time and space. The choice less than an hour before was straightforward: keep trying to dig a brief, low-contrast and probably not photogenic tornado out of increasingly murky, rainy … [Read more...]
Ominous Extravagance
A dangerously severe yet alluringly beautiful supercell airbrushes the Great Plains sky with chunks, platforms, streaks, and swirls of rapidly evolving cloud textures, tinted in the pastels of filtered afternoon light. As the storm was both fast-moving and occasionally flinging hot bolts of electricity in disturbingly close proximity, appreciation time was reduced to nervous intervals of several … [Read more...]
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