As a tiered shelf cloud roared into the Badlands, not far from a dilapidated ghost town called Scenic, its northern portion made quite the scenic scene beyond the verdant fields atop the High Plains landscape. About a hundred yards away, hobbling quickly on a pulled calf muscle from a slip in the mud in Chadron two days before, I positioned for the radically different, yet equally cherished, … [Read more...]
Night Supercell Blowout
The last vestiges of a city-lit nighttime supercell's tiered, stacked structure translated across the near northeastern sky, as its outflow rushed out to choke off remaining inflow. Within 10 minutes, the rear-flank gust front had roared past, rendering refreshingly cool northerly winds, while the storm lost what little lightning it still had been producing in the main core, then soon enough, … [Read more...]
Dusty Forward-Flank Tornado
This was the first, best-organized and perhaps longest-lived, of several tornadoes that developed along the forward-flank/inflow interface of a weird, midday, occluded-front-riding supercell, nearly collocated with a synoptic low, in northwestern Kansas. It raised a tremendous amount of field dust for at least 10 minutes before being hidden behind that oncoming wall of rain to the left. The rain … [Read more...]
Crawler beyond the Farmhouse
Taking this shot from a public right-of-way, I still couldn't help but notice the lit, occupied mobile home serving as a farmhouse, and wondering what the occupant was thinking about all the flickering and noise outside. Valuable and welcomed west Texas rain? Static-causing, loud nuisance to TV watching? Danger to electronics within and livestock without? All of the above? The storm formed … [Read more...]
Prairie Storm Looming
Looming darkly over a couple abandoned South Dakota schoolhouses, a big supercell base casts an ominous pall over the landscape, while a wall cloud gathers (behind the gap between the buildings). Despite the size and obvious great depth of this growing storm, it would fail to produce a tornado before being overtaken by a raging complex. That trailing activity evolved from an earlier supercell … [Read more...]
CGs through a Downburst
From within, lightning conspired with external twilight to illuminate a blue-hour thunderhead in western Kansas, near "Weskan" of course. Here, a downburst descended from the backside, hit ground and took off horizontally, forming a rain foot through which the bottom of the left flash penetrated. Though the preceding step leader travels faster than wind, it can be blown, and the leftward-tilted … [Read more...]
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