Here was a peculiar combination of a truly hybrid shelf and wall cloud that couldn't decide which it wanted to be. A tremendous precipitation surge had descended through the back side of the supercell, then started to wrap through the southwest side of the low-level mesocyclone, accelerating the storm but not completely undercutting the original low-level circulation, whose cloud material still … [Read more...]
Dumont Dust Tube
The "Dumont" tornado seldom, if ever, had a condensation funnel, but it lasted ten minutes while gradually lofting dust toward the rotating, scuddy cloud base above. I was unsurprised and glad to learn that this vortex produced no known damage, in a sparsely populated area of large ranches and few structures. Despite dozens of chases and even more supercells seen in these parts, the vast area … [Read more...]
Prairie Fire Response
After midday dryline passage, a fire began a couple miles to the south-southwest, its embers blowing into a swath of dry, tall grass from the previous growing season. Fires in the southern Great Plains can race out to tens or hundreds of thousands of acres within just a few hours under such dry and windy circumstances, in a severe drought, with crispy fine fuels. Fortunately, two factors saved … [Read more...]
Twisted Blasts in the Blue Hour
After the "slender sunset supercell" tattooed itself onto my memory for life, the storm very slowly weakened into the deepening twilight blue, while another developed on its outflow boundary to the west. Nonetheless, when it came to generating electricity, the little storm that could, most certainly did. I lost count of how much lightning it flung every which way from its middle to upper … [Read more...]
Cloud with No Name
Convectively caused but not convectively structured, laminar yet not entirely lenticular, detached yet dependent, this layered cloud band reminded me a great deal of a tail cloud, but wasn't. Later, it would become part of a tail feature connected the supercell here unseen at left (a storm definitely subject to attention and amazement!). This feature's structure and basic formative process on … [Read more...]
Under-Anvil Crawler
This was one of the longest single lightning channels I've ever seen to extend outside cloud, stretching for tens of miles across the sky, taking a couple seconds to complete its circuit, and reaching a substantial fraction of the distance groundward along the way. The massive and beautiful spark shot out beneath and between two well-separated areas of a severe squall line's trailing … [Read more...]
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