One Eye On The Sky

Day 12 turned out to be a classic Storm Chase-day. We went to Colorado in the morning and drove toward a promising storm, but the roads were not in the same direction as the storm went so we got behind and inside the storm again, which meant rain and poor visibility.

Fortunately, the storms pops up earlier in Colorado than the rest of the Midwest so even though we wasted 2 hrs on this storm in vain the clos was still at only around 4 p.m. when we made our second attempt. We then ended up in front of a perfect scenery with two super-cells next to each other – we stood and looked back and forth and did not really know which one to keep an eye on. All that was missing was a tornado and the Pulitzer Prize 2009 would be mine! Supposedly it was very close since virtually all the data indicated that a tornado could be formed at any second but the storm rotated a bit too slow.

We continued on and I guess you know the story now. Repositioning, wall cloud, core punch. Today’s big event was that we got into our first great hailstorm and we followed it for nearly 40 minutes. The hail was not as large as before (dime sized hail) but it was cool to see how it completely tore the trees to pieces and was drumming so hard on the car making it completely impossible to talk.

The two super-cells merged some time later and we were hoping for The Perfect Storm, but even if the storm was unbelievably fotogenique, it never went berserk unfortunately.

Textbook example of a storm cell – the rain on the right is the outflow and the low cloud on the left is the inflow. You can see how the rain is sort of sucked into the inflow, almost even before hitting the ground.

Last photo a bit more zoomed in

Rain is beautiful – if you look at it from a distance.

Two clouds, which we hope will begin to rotate. One is white and the other dark gray, depending on how the sun shines at them

Otero County

White Scud

Boobie clouds – but not Mammatus

One of my favorite pictures from the trip – this was the northern part of the double-super cell we looked at

This was the southern part of the same super cell – I would have liked to see this from a bit further away!

You can clearly see how the super-cell is divided into layers

Layers of clouds

One part of the cloud with an anti-cyclone rotation – that is, against the direction the rest of the cloud was rotating

I like this portrait

Then it began to hail immensely – you can see how the leaves from the trees are torn apart

The hail came down like artillery fire on the fields

Foooooooore! I went out to see how it felt but it was not so bad with a thick sweater.

A road in Colorado in June

The sun started to set and the clouds looked like a catamaran boat – a lovely sight

Two details that one sees a bit now and then. A beaver tail-cloud and a vortex (a mini tornado in the clouds), you can see the latter above the beaver tail cloud, a bit to the right of the pink cloud.