One fine, eastern Colorado afternoon, a small, young, low-precipitation (LP) supercell turned southeastward across the treeless rangeland, forming a fitting backdrop to this rusty old tractor that has been left to rust in the sun, snow and rain. This young storm already started to rotate and then split (notice smaller, more distant updraft base of the left mover). Seldom will one find a scene … [Read more...]
Quad-Flash Twilight
A fast-moving, beautifully but somewhat infrequently sparking thunderstorm cluster briefly broke the "infrequent" description, with four cloud-to-ground blasts in just a few seconds. This ionized outburst illuminated the northwestern Kansas sky and landscape beyond the prevailing twilight. Imagine the crazy pattern of thunder unleashed somewhere near the midpoint of these four discharges. When … [Read more...]
View into the Notch
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...]
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