Normally, looking down the forward-flank core region toward a supercell isn't the ideal vantage. In many ways, it wasn't here either. I had busted with a figuratively dice-tossing, conditional forecast along the Raton Mesa this day, then went after this southeastward-moving supercell late, leaving me distant. I didn't have a "clean" approach available, through an area with few paved roads, … [Read more...]
Scuddy, Shelfy Supercell
Building off the backside of an older, outflow-churning storm, this young supercell surfed the outflow southeastward for a bit, somehow cranking up a stout midlevel mesocyclone behind the scuddy shelf cloud. That arcus teemed with tilted towers—narrow updrafts of very moist, highly buoyant boundary-layer air scooped up by the forced lift of the outflow surge, then launched into the broader … [Read more...]
Wildflowers in a Whale’s Mouth
The field of late-spring/early-summer flowers in east-central Texas is obvious here. In storm-observing jargon, a "whale's mouth" is the turbulently textured, upward-sloping underside of a convectively produced shelf cloud, in this case accompanying a rear-flank downdraft that trailed a scuddy supercell. This is how one can find wildflowers in a whale's mouth! With scenery like this, the … [Read more...]
Watery Perspective
One way to see the world is through a fluid point of view, as in this breaking water curtain at the Dallas Arboretum. On a hot day (this wasn’t), it’s tempting to interrupt the cascade oneself! The water curtains break at different points and patterns, depending on both flow rate and random fluid chaos, leaving no two images the same. Dallas TX (8 Mar 23) Looking SE 32.8248, -96.7142 … [Read more...]
Hill Country Sunset
After tangling with a messy complex of storms farther east near Corsicana and Fairfield, which was headed into the dense forests of east Texas, we wandered west through Waco to the Hill Country for late-afternoon to sunset convective scenes action near the earlier storms' outflow boundary. This storm went up well to the northwest, then and traveled southeastward atop the outflow, and actually was … [Read more...]
Counter-Rotating Wall Clouds
After spending a long, late lunchtime in Dallas waiting for signs the cap would break, it did in spades, not far south of town. By the time we managed to get through a growing area of storms and weave our way to the then-dominant cell, it sported a remarkable counter-rotating pair of wall clouds. The one on the left rotated anticyclonically (counterclockwise), with the tail cloud on the near … [Read more...]
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