This dryline-fired supercell was in a transition stage, moving into only slightly destabilized and modified outflow air from a large complex of thunderstorms that swept across Kansas earlier in the afternoon. Instead of weakening, or becoming completely elevated, this storm hung on in a fine balance, with just enough airmass modification, via warm advection and weak diurnal heating, to keep it … [Read more...]
Rush Sparks and Flash Flood 1
This show capped a long but fruitful, three-episode day of storm observing. After I puttered around a late-morning/early-afternoon storm complex and its surging outflow in central Kansas, north and northwest of Wichita, some messy, partially surface-based, mid/late-afternoon supercells (and their outflow-dominant progeny) erupted on the dryline and moved into a somewhat modified western part of … [Read more...]
Irrigating the Storm
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...]
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