Anybody got sucked up into this mothership supercell last night in Oklahoma?
At least many of you saw this at sunset on May 13, 2016. Are you still there or already in the other dimension?
Yesterday, Friday, May 13, 2016, this giant cloud engulfed the sky of Oklahoma at sunset.
Here a first video:
Looking like an alien spaceship, the rotating supercell brought some heavy rain.
Look at this it really looks like a mothership.
A supercell thunderstorm is characterized by a sustained and powerful rotating updraft.
These storms originate in unstable air accompanied by a particular type of changing wind direction at various altitudes in the atmosphere.
And the storm started:
A common combination supportive of supercells is a southerly or southeasterly wind near ground level and a southwesterly or westerly wind higher up in the atmosphere.
This combination of changing wind directions creates a horizontal rolling motion in the lower atmosphere.
The same rapidly rising air motions that form the thunderstorm turn this horizontal rotation into a vertical rotation, and in the case of this particular storm, this rotation is spectacularly evident in the circular striations, or layers, visible in the cloud structure.
The structure of supercell thunderstorms allows rain and hail to fall well away from the source of the warm, unstable air fueling the storm, so these storms do not choke on their own rain-cooled air.
This cloud is gigantic:
In some cases this allows supercell thunderstorms to stay intact for hours, covering tens or even hundreds of miles producing giant hail, very high winds, and tornadoes.
This rotating supercell looks like an alien invasion, but it actually forms far more often than a visit from E.T.
