The messy supercell, that I first intercepted a couple hours before west of Alzada, MT, had raced east-southeastward to Belle Fourche, encountering richer moisture along the way, and was fixing to move into town with hurricane-force gusts and 4-inch-diameter hail. As my late friend Jim Leonard said about another giant-hail-producing supercell he filmed in the mid-1980s, this storm was "serious … [Read more...]
Electrified Twilight Sky
An older, large supercell that was growing upscale into a bow echo absorbed a newer, broad-based, rapidly organizing supercell that formed on a horizontal roll in the original storm's inflow region. The result was intense and complex, as one would expect: a county-scale, rotating thunderstorm cluster, with a central mesocyclone over 20 miles wide, offering large hail, very severe wind, and flash … [Read more...]
South Dakota Dust Plume
Bailing south out of the back side of a severe thunderstorm complex, I had to stop briefly to let pass an extraordinarily dense plume of dust that outflow scoured off plowed fields. What first seemed an annoying inconvenience became one of my favorite, most evocative storm-chasing images of the season, as the deeply shadowed dust nearly (but not completely) obscured a lone tree on the open South … [Read more...]
Elevated Supercell Sparking
A long chase day, that started in midafternoon over southern Montana, ended near the northeast rim of the South Dakota Badlands in twilight, after I bailed off a growing, rotating cluster of severe storms that evolved from merged supercells. While preparing to shoot lightning eastward into the back of that cluster, I noticed a small, discrete, elevated supercell to the northwest, also throwing … [Read more...]
Layered Illumination
Sitting in my motel room at 11 p.m., getting horizontal and unwinding after a Colorado chase day, I noticed faint flashes out the window, and on radar, an intensifying, lengthening band of elevated thunderstorms to the west, moving mostly eastward. That reinvigorated me for a short trip down the Interstate to meet them. The richly complicated cloud layers over the gust front made a wonderful … [Read more...]
Weak, Scuddy Spinup
For less than a minute, under the broader, flatter wall cloud, this persistent, scuddy, rotating lowering yielded rising, modestly rotating tendrils of scud that coiled up from the surface. Moistened considerably by at least two storms' cores (this one and another to the north-northeast), as well as rain the previous day, the weakly tornadic circulation couldn't raise dust. Nonetheless, with a … [Read more...]
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