March 7th Storms

Mother nature woke form her long winter nap and decided to punish Oklahoma with a series of long lived tornadoes on March 5-6th. The Wichita area was under the gun for severe weather but for most of the day, the storms remained either on the cold front or in Oklahoma.

SPC did a good job discussing the tornado dangers near Tulsa.

Our lone Mark on this map was a one-inch hail report from Butler County, to the west of Wichita.

I'd been watching radar, seeing the mess down in Oklahoma. A couple of small supercells started SW of Wichita and grew. I needed to see some lightning.

This was 6 miles west of El Dorado, looking east toward the city.

With it being night and wind quickly approaching from the cold front to the west, I went back home. There is an interesting little settler's cemetery next to I-135 and 85th street, where I shot this lighting.

This last shot and video was from the Valley Christian Church and looking west as the cold front and shelf cloud entered.

Maybe we will have an active spring.  Please not like last year and all the local hail.

NFT Derecho Dream

 This was a large squall line.  Originally the photo took seven different photos to make the panoramic. If you notice the car on the right looks slightly blurry.  The last photo was taken when the gust front of about 70 mph hit, driving all the chaff, rocks, and dirt at me making it blurry.  Luckily I was nearby shelter and was able to wait out the worst of it.  Derecho has been used by NASA, NOAA, and the National Weather Service.

Derecho -

Derecho - City of the Silent

Derecho - The Demon Storm

This is available to view and purchase at https://opensea.io/collection/derecho-and-the-dream

Storms 10/7/16

It was a chaotic week. First the storms coming through on Tuesday then a sudden increase of storms Thursday with tornado potential increasing on every Storm Prediction Center update.

With a cold front add dry line descending quickly into Wichita by that afternoon, there was an increasing chance for severe weather. Tornadoes were reported north of Wichita near Salina and SE of Wichita near Ark City.  For information on this check out the National Weather Service link:  http://www.weather.gov/ict/oct6th_tornadoes.

from http://www.weather.gov/ict/oct6th_tornadoes

Slowly storms began to fill in and had some severe potential before giving in and forming a squall line with below severe level winds.

At Woodlawn and K-254

Not sure what it was trying to organize.

360 degree panoramic

04/14/2015 storms . . . meh

It's been a busy year for Ruminations of Thunder.  We've had art shows, Final Fridays, and moved. In the midst of moving and house repairs, I decided to chase a severe warned storm heading into the city. It was a beautiful storm that became suddenly outflow dominate before it fell apart.  Lots of movement in the atmosphere.

10/04/2013 Severe Weather Event, Meh

With some strong tornadoes coming from the same cold front in Nebraska and Iowa, the Kansas portion of the storm had a threat of becoming a strong squall line.  Around 3:30 the dry line and cold front began initiation to the west of Wichita.  Movement went very slowly, by 5:00 I was out NE of Wichita and waiting until about 6:30 before it moved in.  The storm pulled quite a lot of rain cooled air into the inflow and somewhat limited the squall lines development.  It did go briefly severe, with some smaller hail threat.  These dynamics gave rise to a couple discrete supercells that dumped rain and caused an impressive amount of lightning in the Wichita area.

I'm going to miss this over winter.

I noticed the speck of dirt on the lens about half way through the storm.  Unfortunately, it followed through the panoramic.

Mammatus clouds starting forming to the left on the high point of the clouds.

Beaver tail pulling rain cooled air into the inflow.

Just a Nice Thunderstorm

After all the bad weather in Oklahoma recently and the loss of some great storm chasers at the top of their game, it's nice to have a nice summer storm come through without huge amounts of wind or hail.

I went out to one of my typical locations a couple miles north of Kechi and attached the lightning detector to the camera.  Lightning was a little close.

I believe this is positive stroke lightning that struck around 2 miles to the NW of my location.  There were multiple flashes of the lightning although I think I caught 3 of the same bolt.  This lightning can create close to 300,000 amps and 1,000,000,000 volts.










More lightning facts: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/lightning/positive.htm

NASA Liked One of My Pics!!!

I entered a contest a while back and found out last week that one of my photos was picked.

I'm a geek at heart, to know that NASA liked one of my photos makes me pretty excited.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79283

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GPM/news/gpm-photo-contest-winners.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/PPM/news/gpm-photo-contest-winners.html

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/3560-extreme-weather-photo-contest-winners.html

Spring Training 02/20/2012

Rumors of storms, cold core funnels, and a heart shaped convective outlook a week after Valentine's Day promised a fun start to preseason.  It's too early to start thinking we're going to have an active season based on a warm winter.  Accuweather's stated that the El Nino cycle is gearing up and the drought areas could (operative word) have a fairly active season this year after a strong El Nina pattern shifted storms east last year.  We will see what the season brings in March, and hopefully a new camera to capture it.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning

I'm setting here with the windows open.  With 40 days over 100 streak this has been a pleasure with 60 degree temperatures outside.  A handful of weak cold fronts came through in the last week, one causing the storms I posted last week.  This one set up a slight squall line that gave the dramatic orange atmosphere that always makes one think of bad weather.

This was a two part line, the first one missed Wichita from the west with the second only barely touching the eastern corner of Sedgwick Co.

 Wind hit about 30MPH but it barely rained and the lightning moved off to the east.

06/20/11 Squall

The dry line lazily rolled closer to Wichita with a whimper of threat.  Storms were firing in Salina, but down here, wind.  Nothing seemed to be happening so I went a little north to watch the storms. 

 To the south, a single cumulus tower began to rise and soon all hell broke loose.  Before the storm even seemed to mature the National Weather Service issued a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for the area.

Clouds began stacking up on the dryline and  we had a squall line.

Hail, high wind, and lots of rain.

The line took over an hour to move thorough town.  There was wind related damage (trees, a couple roofs, and power lines), but no significant hail.

 












Afterwards mammatus clouds were very visible on the tail end of the front showing lots of turbulence up above.  The temp dropped about 25 degrees and we finally lost the blast furnace wind that hit most of the day.

May 24,2011

We were under a high risk of severe weather and some of the most influential storm chasers I know were commenting how bad the forecast for Wichita looked.  Although it has been a mostly quiet spring, we were due for bad weather, and with Joplin, MO so fresh in our minds, many people including myself were worried.

Storms began firing up in Oklahoma west of OKC and heading here fast.  Even the management at work released us to go home early.  Of course, I went chasing.  I hate fast moving storms.  These were coming in at 50-60mph and beginning to join into a nasty multicell storm.

For this storm I decided to take out the Chevy POS.  No point in destroying totally reliable transportation.  I grabbed Ruminator Brent again (he was with me on the previous storm posted) and we headed out west to intercept.  Right before we left, a cell formed before the multicell and looked interesting.  We ran to Maize, Kansas and set up.  Once again at Nancy's A-Mazing Sandwiches, sorry Nancy there was a weather apocalypse we had to get ready for, so we stayed in the parking lot.

Boosted the shadows in this to show cloud definition now I see an inflow line.

While watching very dark, very overcast sky, two bicyclists passed us holding up traffic on one of the main streets in Maize.  I think my chase partner and I stared at them as they went by thinking of a case to present on functional Darwinism.  Unfortunately dark, overcast, and rainy sky does nothing for photography.

Lots of rain.

We sat in the parking lot watching the storm came in and the lightning gave a show that now I kick myself for not recording.  Seemed like we were surrounded by lightning and thunder for a while.

We ran back across town to the east side seemingly to get rained on a little harder.  Thank you Rain-X.

The storms flew through the area and slowed as it hit the city.  Reports were coming in about the destruction in OKC and surrounding areas, but Wichita really dodged the bullet.

We ran back to the house to check radar (I know I need to upgrade and join this decade, hmmmm maybe I'll add a paypal account for help).  The storms in Wichita weakened drastically and a large strong squall line had formed in western Kansas spawning several warnings.  As the sun went down, the line decided to start moving east.  The bottom of the squall line would hit Wichita and as it grew close, thunderstorm warnings were issued, although they were borderline severe.

Add caption

They appeared to build for a while, then weakened as the sun dipped below the horizon.

The winds were still as this moved in then a moderate gust of cold wind let you know it was coming.  I tried taking lightning pictures and developed a game called Capture/Processing.  When the Sony DSC-V3 is capturing and lightning strikes, I get it.  When it's processing, I get nothing.  Last night the storm won.

After dark I started playing with long exposure as the shelf cloud came into sight.  The below was taken with a 5 second shutter speed.  The light on the left is from Wichita, the light in the middle was lightning.
Not too much on the horizon, yet.  I could use a couple days worth of rest.