| bobbutts |
| (Weather Hobbyist) |
| Sun Jun 25 2006 08:38 PM |
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Can someone tell me what I was looking at? (warning large pic)
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This was taken yesterday from my front yard looking almost straight up. There was a vigorous spin and it appeared to be sucking all the low clouds around it. It was clearly a rotating updraft, but I'm not sure if it was a mesocyclone or what?. According to http://www.nbc-2.com/articles/readarticle.asp?articleid=7665&z=3&p= there was a funnel reported nearby from the same storm. While I was watching it it really tightened up and increased it's spinning.
It definately didn't look like a funnel to me at that point though.
There are several more full size pics from the series here:
http://bobbutts.mine.nu/images/
edit: reduced image size
| vineyardsaker |
| (Weather Guru) |
| Sun Jun 25 2006 09:09 PM |
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Re: Can someone tell me what I was looking at? (warning large pic)
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could you post the same pics at less then 300k each? with dial-up like I have downloading many MB of files is not an option...
alternatively - could you attach at least one, the most telling one, to your post (just edit, preview and use the add file option)?
cheers,
VS
| bobbutts |
| (Weather Hobbyist) |
| Tue Jun 27 2006 08:18 PM |
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Re: Can someone tell me what I was looking at? (warning large pic)
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I reduced and zipped up those files
http://bobbutts.mine.nu/images/reduced.zip
You can find the individual ones named reduced_* in http://bobbutts.mine.nu/images/
From digging around it appears that the feature is a rotating wall cloud.. Although much less impressive than most of the ones I saw on the net. Also according to what I read Mesocyclones are based on radar presentation, not ground observations, so doubtful that's the term I want.
| CoalCracker |
| (Weather Hobbyist) |
| Wed Jun 28 2006 07:40 PM |
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Re: Can someone tell me what I was looking at? (warning large pic)
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Bob,
You might find the Tampa Bay Skywarn page interesting. You can view/print the Basic and Advanced Spotters' Guides which contain information on thunderstorm and tornado formation.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/tbw/htm/tbw/TampaBaySkywarnPage.htm
| vineyardsaker |
| (Weather Guru) |
| Mon Jul 03 2006 12:43 AM |
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Re: Can someone tell me what I was looking at? (warning large pic)
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Quote:
I reduced and zipped up those files
http://bobbutts.mine.nu/images/reduced.zip
You can find the individual ones named reduced_* in http://bobbutts.mine.nu/images/
From digging around it appears that the feature is a rotating wall cloud.. Although much less impressive than most of the ones I saw on the net. Also according to what I read Mesocyclones are based on radar presentation, not ground observations, so doubtful that's the term I want.
Thanks a lot for the pics. I looked at them with great interest because I have observed the same thing happening several times in Volusia County. My best guess is that these are indeed clouds rotations which sometimes result in tornadoes. The fact that Mesocyclones are declared based on radar observations does not mean that groud spotters would not be able to see some cloud rotations, right? Besides, I was once told by a guy from NOAA in Melbourne that during the summer Mesocyclones are very hard to spot on radars and that many could be missed.
I hope somebody more qualifed will explain to use exactly what we saw.
Kind regards,
VS