Dung? Ok, this is legit about Harry Potter, welcome to the forums.

 

Very photogenic dust sucker of a tornado in Texas. Thankfully in bumfuck nowhere

 

Some more pics from that monstrous wedge tornado. They're the best kind of tornadoes. Out in the middle of nowhere, and not hurting anybody or destroying anything.

Spoiler: some clear'ish pics and rain-wrapped horror

 

Just a fun lil pic of the Black Dread and Maegor descending upon Aegon the Uncrowned and Quicksilver. My mans Aegon shoulda learned from Obi-Wan. But I'm not sure the result would be any different had Quicksilver gotten above Balerion. Perhaps the dragon could have used his better agility to pluck Maegor from the saddle. But for all of Quicksilver's jukes and jives, I'd bet Balerion's top speed is high enough to strike it from the sky.

 

I have one of those new AI image generation programs.

Here's "female Harry Potter." Not bad.

 

Looks like the daughter of Harry and Myrtle.

 

Or Harry and McGonagall.

 

Cursed.

 

Another picture of my favorite thing in nature.



If you could zoom out, you'd see leafage bending towards the tornado (not from suckage), but as wind is flowing in from the right of the picture, inflow flying in to the updraft and get sucked up. You can see the heavy rain behind the tornado on the left side, a beautiful example of the rear-flank downdraft of a supercell thunderstorm, and it would expand well back. The main updraft of the supercell, the mesocyclone, is the cloud mass on the left of the picture. A mass of moisture and hate and wind exploding upwards up to 12-13 miles at a max (if you were very far away, you would see the top of the beast perfectly flattening out as it hits the top ceiling of the troposphere, and the main center of the updraft overshooting it into the stratosphere. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...3_-_NOAA.jpg/1600px-Cumulonimbus13_-_NOAA.jpg) that has started rotating from the wind shear of the upper atmosphere moving in. The separate part on the right is the mesoanticyclonic structure. A beautiful example of them both in one supercell. If the main updraft formed in the right section of the storm, the tornado would end up rotating the other way.

It's just lovely and this particular tornado stayed fucked off in nowhere so nobody died.

 

This pic, and the bunch in your previous post are stunning.

We’re starting to get more tornados in NZ lately, but nothing remotely close to these. Both terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

 

You will get more as the climate changes more, iirc from climate change science. Just as we will, just as winter storms get more severe on average, just as hurricanes get more severe on average. Just as heat waves get more severe, just as cold fronts get more aggressive, just as...

 

Because I want to talk more about tornados, and post more stunning images:



An aerial view of a tornado family in the panhandle of Texas on 15 June 2023, the one on the right side of this picture basically obliterated half of the town of Perryton, Texas. An officially rated EF3 tornado, and a pretty handsome boy. Innocuous from the air, just whirly wind... estimated wind speeds of 136-165 mph (218-265 kph) house material completely shredded, if not granulated*

*yes, that's a thing, housing material not just destroyed, but disintegrated into small particles... The 2013 Joplin, Missouri tornado**I at 200 mph or 322 kph, the 1999 Bridge-Creek Moore, Oklahoma City*** tornado (that still has the highest wind speeds ever recorded on this planet at 301 mph +/- 10 mph (404 kph +/- 16 kph) by a Doppler on Wheels, monstrous, indifferent, legendary), and the 2013 Destroyer of Worlds Monster Tornado around the Oklahoma town of El Reno, the first tornado to ever kill any documented and registered storm chasers****

Each of those monsters were multiple-vortex tornadoes that had unpredictable, and deadly, vortices that circled the main tornado, dangerous areas of rotation that were orbiting the main area of condensed rotation, ie., the main tornado. The secondary vortices of el Reno were spinning around the main area of condensation of the wedge at upwards of 100 mph/160 kph, and since the main area of tornadic condensation was very nearly 3 miles across, well. Fuck.

The new enhanced fujita scale depends on damage indicators to man-made structures to determine the rating (EF0-EF5). If you have a house that is completely swept away from its foundation, wherein it was bolted down, you have an EF4+ damage indicator. Ground scouring (grass and dirt completely swept up to a few inches), or asphalt scouring (same), aren't damage indicators. You can have a tornado that sucks up two inches of asphalt and concrete or scours up all grass and dirt and crops, that doesn't mean much since the new enhanced Fujita scale depends on damage to quote/unquote well built structures. If a properly fastened home with anchor bolts is swept away from the concrete foundation, you've got an EF5. Horrific. If the damage survey reveals that the homes were fastened with only nails and was swept away, EF3+

But there's a lot of weirdo tornadoes out there, like the Jarrell, Texas tornado of 1997. It was a complete bitch fucker ball-licker of a tornado that was only moving at about 10 mph. It started off as a cute, rope tornado, then had an awesome picture of the multiple vortices within (the Dead Man Walking tornado picture), then evolved to the point where it was a wedge tornado that was the ender of worlds*****

* Perryton tornado:



**Joplin, wrapped in rain:



***Bridge-Creek Moore:



****el Reno:




nearly 3 miles wide:





The car of Tim Samaras and co., the storm chasers who lost their lives when it moved north, Tim was found dead in the car, seatbelted. His son's body was found the next day a quarter mile away. His partner was in a ditch a few hundred feet away. The car's engine was a few thousand feet down the road wrapped around a debarked tree






***** Jarrell. Rope to walker to finger of god

I've officially gone chasing about a dozen times, but haven't hit personal paydirt yet. High CAPE days (available convective potential energy), and high storm prediction center outlook days, Including the March 31-April 1 outbreak in Iowa. I was behind the EF4 that hit Keota by, literally, 20 minutes, but was able to render some aid. But no pics. Nothing

Keota, IA Tornado:



I think I've got an older pic of a lightning flashed image of another tornado from that outbreak earlier in this thread i think. Or in TOMD

 

Whelp, guess I know what tonight's nightmares will be about.

 

Fascinating, @MonkeyEpoxy , thanks for the write up. Glad I don’t live near where those kind of fuckers appear.

Any resources you’d recommend for further reading?

 

There are some awesome dual-polarization radar apps that you can get, RadarOmega and RadarScope, both cost like $5, but it's lovely. It gives you access to all of the mesoscale atmospheric notices, has reflectivity radar images (what you'll see when you go to like, weather.com to see the radar), velocity readings, which show the winds in relation to the radar (for most, red shows winds blowing away the radar site and green shows winds blowing towards from the radar site (redshift, greenshift, astronomy applications as well), so if you have red and green right next to each other, well, they get spinny.

My favorite picture of a textbook supercellular thunderstorm is this one:





Another diagram:



Basically, a tornadic storm has to have a lot of shit to go right, atmospherically, even for weak ones. Instability is the first, a pocket of air that is more humid and hot than all of the air around it. Think a hypothetical sphere on top of a perfect hill. Which way will it roll down? Who knows?! Wind shear is another one, especially vertically. Say that at ground level, the wind is blowing westerly, but you go up a few miles, and it's blowing southerly. The winds interact there, and if they're powerful enough, it causes a column of air to start to rotate. (The wind blowing from the south interacts with the wind blowing west and starts rotating counter-clockwise, or vice versa, and when the sphere on the hill decides to roll down chaotically, the air is humid and hotter than all of the air getting sucked in, and starts to condense into clouds that suck up all of that hot, humid glory. The air condenses into rain, then the variable windsheer causes a lot of that rain and moisture to be sucked up high enough to where it freezes, hail, and the stronger the updraft, the longer it can hold up that ice, until it can't. I've witnessed hail the size of grapefruits. That storm didn't have the aforementioned wind sheer to tilt the updraft enough to cause tornado formation, but that hail was probably worse. It punched through our roof into the attic.) Then you go up another couple of miles and the wind is blowing westerly as well, that tilts the updraft that forms from the ground level and mid level. That causes the updraft to infuse the entire storm system and make a mesocyclone (the entirety of the storm starts to rotate, you can see this in time lapsed images)

And since the storm can influence the immediate area, the winds start sucking into the storm from, typically, the southeast, those winds get sucked up and into the mesocyclone and increase the speeds. They go in and up, and up, until they either hit the tropopause and stall or have enough energy to overshoot the top into the stratusphere, there are documented thunderstorms that had enough energy to shoot up 70,000 feet:



(you can see the rotation here, counter-clockwise as viewed from above, the moisture in the air is condensing and following it, whipping around (see that darkish gray cloud going around the bright white of the main updraft. where you see that bit of clouds shooting above the rest of the anvil) the right side of the bright white is dropping a lot of rain and hail, that's the front flank downdraft (the storm is moving a few degrees north of right as the pic was taken), the bright white cloud formation to the left of the picture is the rear flank downdraft, sagging behind, absorbing energy. There's a lot of rain and hail there as well, but nowhere near as heavy. You can see the wind inflow as the dark gray boundary in between the white of the left and white. That is energy and wind and hate getting sucked into the supercell). This particular supercell I got from wikipedia, if it has a tornado, would be nearly invisible amongst the rain left of the bright white light on the ground, surrounded by the faint dots of light.



Reflectivity seen tornadoes are usually powerful, and notable with what is called a hook echo:



(The inflow here is sucking in through Newcastle, feeding the meso. That light purple area near bridge creek is a tornadic debris signature, that bit of purple, which on a normal storm would indicate heavy rain and hail, is actually debris. Wood and brick and dirt thrown aloft high enough to be pinged by weather radar.)

"Debris balls" like this are pretty rare on reflectivity radar images, they require particularly violent tornadoes.

A lot of these required wind interactions would typically be invisible on a reflectivity radar that is only interested in the volume and surface area of what it's bouncing off of and back to the radar. That's why we have velocity radar, that only cares about wind blowing towards or away from the source.

Recall the redshift and greenshift:

Here's a reflectivity radar reading and velocity reading of the Moore 2013 tornado:



You can see the debris ball on the left with a well defined hook echo, but look at the velocity on the right. On most velocity radar visuals, red brightens up to bright red as the winds blow faster and green darkens to blue likewise. The place where those two signatures meet make a couplet that indicates very strong rotation. The right picture would make most meteorologists shit their pants, because it's a super tight couplet that has incredible strong winds.

Then you have the correlation coefficient. Most modern radars fire off waves in duos that can compare the relative size of everything they hit. A regular thunderstorm will mostly have rain drops that are very comparable in size so the correlation is high... but when you add hail it drops a bit, since the hail stones are bigger than the raindrops so the correlation drops. Then you have violent tornadoes that have lofted wood and brick and trees and leaves and people and whatever. The correlation between the sizes of those things and regular rain drops are very low since they're very different in size. It's why the sign of a tornado is called a CC drop, the correlation coefficient between the things the radar pings off of is small. Here's an example of a CC drop from the Amory tornado a few months ago, with the meteorologist. It's pretty chilling. The CC is very nearly bigger than the town, meaning that the debris signature that has been lofted into the atmosphere by the tornado is bigger than the town:



https://twitter.com/i/status/1639490172952936448

Here's a time lapse Pecos Hank classic:

 

That seems like an unusual place for one of those? (assuming it's DC, that is)

 

I saw that movie. It sucked.

 

EF3 near Yuma, CO yesterday that showed incredible deviant motion



Red line is the tornado path. Surged due north, and man the main body of Yuma got lucky.

 

Tornadic supercell hovering over Denton, TX, picture taken from 90 miles away on a plane above Corsicana, TX. That anvil cloud capped inside the stratosphere approximately 12 miles above the ground, punching through the troposphere.


This storm was responsible for the high end EF3 tornado in the Valley View area around Celina and Melissa, TX.