Tag: Severe Weather

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And Beyond The Infinite

Death from the skies!

Or… dust from the skies! I’m gonna go all Fred Baker on it and issue my very own…

Martian Tornado Warning

…because… check this out.

Martian Tornado

It’s a giant dust devil on Mars.

A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The scene is a late-spring afternoon in the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The view covers an area about four-tenths of a mile (644 meters) across. North is toward the top. The length of the dusty whirlwind’s shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than half a mile (800 meters) in height. The plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.

So… it’s giant Martian tornado*, in the late part of the Martian spring. People from Arkansas and Oklahoma should colonize this planet immediately (as I’m from Arkansas, I know of what I speak). We’d be right at home. Let’s land a few well-stocked trailers there and get going.

* maybe not a tornado formed from the same moisture-reliant convection structure that causes tornadoes in the American midwest, sure, but obviously there’s some kind of atmospheric shear making this happen – it’s the same root cause in the end.… Read more

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Funny Stuff Should We Talk About The Weather?

Maybe you’d better rephrase that

Let me be the first to say that there’s nothing funny about the severe weather that’s been killing folks by the dozen across the southern states. I’ve seen videos of Alabama tornadoes tonight that make me want to mess my pants, even though I’m on Youtube. Stuff like that makes me feel pretty sheepish about posting cell phone photos of the relatively mousy little rotating wall cloud that drifted over my house last night.

That being said, I’ve always thought that one of the first duties one has after something like this is to find a reason to smile. And the following gem from CNN.com fits the bill nicely. … Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

Tornado photos: updated.

Garrison Avenue, Fort Smith - April 20, 2006
I’d been planning on doing this for much of this year, but in the end really only had about half an hour to devote to it. I took a printout of the photos that I took in 1996 after the Fort Smith tornado, drove down to Garrison Avenue for the first time in ages, and then set out on foot – looking really odd running around with my camera and printed-out photos, I’m sure – to recapture as many of the sights (and the sites) as I could from as close as I could get to the same angles. A lot of the differences in camera angles are due simply to the traffic factor – one day after the tornado hit downtown Fort Smith in 1996, the National Guard had Garrison Avenue roped off from the bridge down to the 600 or 700 block, so yeah, you could walk around in the middle of a busy five-line artery leading from Arkansas to Oklahoma without a single smidgeon of fear. Ten years later…well, I hard a hard time finding opportunities to cross the street on foot, let alone get photos from the same out-in-the-middle-of-the-street angles. Anyway, you can see the results (along with commentary and the original 1996 photos of the same locations) here; it’s really quite sobering, actually. Garrison Avenue was already a bit of a poor area ten years ago when I was living in an apartment there; and today I walked past tons of places that were closed, or available for rent or sale, where there used to be at least small businesses.… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

Another local weather myth.

With the 1996 Fort Smith tornado very much on my mind, and having recently re-read my “tornado diary,” I thought I would offer one major factual correction. The Arkansas River really doesn’t do anything to deflect tornadoes. Not a thing. It can’t stop a supercell thunderstorm from crossing the river and then dropping a funnel right into downtown, or any other part of town. And in the case of the ’96 storm, every once in a while you’re dealing with a storm that’s just too big to be bothered by a little river in the way. Sort of like every once in a while you’ll see a hurricane that tops the levees. So I just wanted to get that correction on the record, before anyone thought it was a true thing – it’s a local weather myth, a meteorological old wives’ tale, and a dangerous one at that because it gets people to let their guard down.
She’s a strange lady, this mother nature.… Read more

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Serious Stuff Should We Talk About The Weather?

Ten years after the night the sky fell.

I’ve gotten a number of e-mails, and even a call from a reporter, in the past week, all related to the 1996 Fort Smith Tornado Journal that I wrote in the pre-blog version of Scribblings almost exactly ten years ago. (I only just realized that I hadn’t ported this rather lengthy article over to the new, more bloggish portion of Scribblings, so I’ve done just that as of last night.) Generally, everyone’s been upbeat about it, glad that there’s some document on the web from someone who was there when it happened, and I’m glad they like it. In its own way, it’s a document of a time and a place and a mindset, and so I guess that since it’s a document of my mindset at a juncture that was less than favorable for me to hang on to all of my marbles, if I’m to be honest, I’m a little bit embarrassed about it. It’s a bit “overwritten” from a stylistic standpoint, and veers a little too close to angsty emotional overload for my tastes these days. But that’s who and where I was at the time, so I’ve managed to resist my urges to edit it or rewrite any of it.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s been reading it and letting me know.… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

Facing my fears…and promptly crapping my pants.

Thursday night was an interesting night at work. We had numerous very close calls with tornadoes forming and never quite touching down in Fort Smith and the surrounding areas. At one point, I was asked to ditch what I was doing and go outside with a camera on my shoulder to see if I could catch some of this action. Unless a flash of lightning helped, I wasn’t going to see crap with that camera, but what the hell, it’s a bit of excitement. So I stood outside, rolled the tape, and aimed at the sky.
A little side note about tornadoes: I’m scared to death of them. Really. My real life up-close-and-personal experiences with them have only cemented that, from my very earliest tornado experiences to the “big one” in 1996. I’m fascinated by them, I’ve tried to educate myself on how and why they happen to try to get rid of some of that fear, and it hasn’t really helped, because all I’ve learned is that they’re an unavoidable, unstoppable force of nature that’ll kill you mighty dead if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably destroy you home and everything in it too. It’s rather difficult not to fear that.… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather? Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Sporadic tornadic

Not that there isn’t much to report tonight, but there’s a lot of nasty weather going on right now – tornadoes all over the place. Obviously, I’ll get back to you later; I’m in the studio shooting stuff for the inevitable “we done good!” promo.
EDIT @ 9pm: Actually caught a funnel cloud forming in the air tonight – sadly, I got inside with the tape from my camera and found that it was just too dark to pick out. We’ll still under the gun – the worst is yet to come! 😕… Read more

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Should We Talk About The Weather?

All clear

Looks like the tornado sirens may have been somewhere between a close call and a false alarm (and in any case, the Weather Service never issued a warning – not that this necessarily means anything to anyone who’s lived in this area for the past ten years); a Crawford County deputy called in a funnel cloud, and radar indicated rotation. A little while after the hailstorm I poked my head out the window and found some mammatus clouds.
Mammatus clouds - March 9, 2006
It’s interesting what strange memories pop up sometimes, when you least expect them, and these clouds got me started on a very weird trip down memory lane. … Read more