Elevated thunderstorms, built upon one outflow surge after another, continued to light up the sky across west-central Kansas. The storms fired spidery crawler lightning this way and that, to the delight of a shivering but satisfied storm photographer and meteorologist. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how an elevated updraft as small as the one at right could produce so much electricity, but the buoyancy aloft nicely straddled both a warm-cloud inflow region, and ideal icing layers for charge separation leading to lightning generation. The result: every few seconds, similar yet unique blasts of vast illumination aloft.
9 S Rush Center KS (9 May 23) Looking SE
38.3391, -99.3056