A thick, densely rain-wrapped tornado from a rather high-based High Plains storm obviously can happen (here it is and here's another from 8 years earlier!), but isn't common in my experience. In the southeast and sometimes lower Plains, where smaller dewpoint depressions and less evaporative cooling happen, tornadoes can (and often do) generate within dense precip, and can last a long time. … [Read more...]
Eloy Electricity
An electrically prolific, high-based multicell thunderstorm cluster flung over 100 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes within view on this moist southern Arizona evening. I managed to catch about 80 of them on camera. Here are three of the closest, including one with a branched bottom (at right). Their differences in brightness mainly relate to how much of the storm's rain core was falling … [Read more...]
Las Cruces Haboob
This is one of the spookiest, most striking sky scenes I've witnessed outside menacing supercells. Dust and sand roared out of the Organ Mountains and Tularosa Valley region into the Las Cruces area, shoved along by severe thunderstorm outflow that readily lofted still more. Meanwhile, the lift was so intense that dust merged into and surrounded some shelfy cumulus clouds being formed by ascent, … [Read more...]
Outflow Platters
A series of platter-shaped outflow clouds—the nearest having a striking texture and form reminiscent of alien spaceships—developed as a discretely propagating arc of convection, that had produced a minor haboob over the Phoenix area, worked south across low mountains, into the desert valley near Gila Bend. Strange, high-based variants of shelf clouds seem more common in desert or semi-desert … [Read more...]
Blast into the Grand Canyon
Receding away from the viewer with height, disappearing ghostly into a dense rain core, this twilight blast struck the bottom part of a natural amphitheater in the Grand Canyon. It proves that the tallest area is not always the top target for lightning! Alternative channels (the dimmer forks) simply didn’t connect to ground charge before the bright one. This flash made true a longstanding dream … [Read more...]
Furious Forks
For about 15 minutes, this section of a line of storms produced a wickedly brilliant barrage of forked, cloud-to-ground strikes ahead of the main precipitation area, as it interacted with a fresh outflow boundary and evolved into an embedded supercell. The step-leader branch that didn't quite make it to the ground (at left) was lit nicely by electricity that had surged up through the branch that … [Read more...]
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