[Part 1 of 3] In early 2021, we had another nice outbreak of “steam fog” or sea fog on Lake Thunderbird, where bitterly cold air advected over the long axis of the much-warmer lake, eliciting moving fog. Back then, embedded vortices were few and ragged. This time, I managed to snag several. Three of the best-defined appear in this series. This one stretched and bent southward with height as wind changed from northeast along the immediate lake surface to north just a few meters above (where there was less redirecting by land friction). That accounts for the curvy tilt back away from the viewer, and slightly to the right, while rotating cyclonically. At this highly localized scale, the Coriolis effect has no effect, and rotational sense is imparted by small-scale horizontal shear. As with a downward-directed, bathtub-drain vortex, the cyclonic (counterclockwise) rotation here was merely coincidental with respect to that imparted by the Earth on far larger scales, such as hurricanes and synoptic cyclones. [Go to Part 2]
2 WSW Little Axe OK (15 Jan 24) Looking SE
25.2286, -97.2472