One Eye On The Sky

This is a very nice cut video of different tornadoes that someone put up on YouTube. Enjoy.

This is a tornado with the sun about to set in the background. On Youtube it is named the “Most beautiful tornado ever” and I think I agree!

Yep, today we found a tornado – and what a tornado!

Everything looked pretty good in the morning, the first cloud we went out to seemed to have all the attributes we want: a low floating wall cloud, strong rotation and large hail.

We come out just in time to bring out our cameras. The cloud, short thereafter, starts to shape a funnel which then goes back into the cloud. At the second attempt it reaches all the way down to create a tornado. It grows rapidly and soon reaches a base of a few hundred meters. After a short while we end up in the path of pea-sized hail and start to regroup ourselves.

During our repositioning the hail storm grew to the order of golf balls. The car was then actually under a rain of ice balls as big as golf balls! The noise inside the car was crazy, when the hail hit the roof, windows and windshield.

We set off to the next point where the tornado had more of a rain cloud around it which slowly rotated and simultaneously made the tornado a little bit difficult to see. We drove further out on a road that was bordered by dozens of storm watcher cars. By then the tornado was heading straight at us from the right. I wanted to stop but was not completely listened to

Finally, we positioned ourselves on a small plateau where we had a great view of how the tornado roped out – the last stage. We were lucky enough to have the sun in our backs which made the tornado completely white. A fantastic sight!

And this was just the beginning of the day…

Touchdown – a narrow funnel reaches all the way down to the ground. The funnel becomes a tornado.

The tornado is fully developed and is surrounded by hail as shown by the greenish color around.

One can see how the tornado extends up to a tube up into the cloud

The tornado becomes enveloped in rain and becomes a bit harder to see

New position, tornado has begun to die out a bit, you can see how it goes into a green hole of hail

This sight was so beautiful that we take it from another angle!

Now we are up on the plateau and the sun is in our backs. One can see how it begins to taper at the bottom.

Check out the “smoke rings” around the top part!

The narrow part becomes larger further up and makes it look like a bird with a beak

Me and the tornado

A terrific sight. The tornado starts to rope out and spins around on its own axis.

10-15 minutes after it started, it just disappears. I have had a stupid grin in my face all the time. The mood in the car is ecstatic.

A very nice video of a water spout (“water tornado”) in Jacksonville. Check out this link at Weather.com.

Were we supposed to take left or right by the supercell? What does the map say?

Brilliant photo taken by one of the participants of the Cloud 9 storm chasing tour.

Very close, very dangerous and completely amazing

Imagine being the captain of this tanking, looking out, only to see this:

I took this photo in Monteverde, Costa Rica, it was the second of two photos. The first one was ruined since the flash was on. The tube was even further down then. I thought it looked a bit like a tornado, it was a very peculiar cloud nonetheless. It turned out to be a phenomenon caused by cold air pushing downwards or something.