Reflections in a New Year
Distant Nighttime Severe Thunderstorms
7 January 2008
As a significant evening tornado event raged a few hundred miles to the NE across south Missouri, the trailing portion of the same line of convection built southwestward across east-central and south-central Oklahoma for a short time.
We could see the resulting light show as a veritable rampart of pulsating glows from ENE through SSE, new storms forming at the tail end of the line as older ones raced NE at 40-50 mph. Knowing that we could get a good view of the storms looking that way across Lake Thunderbird from Alameda St., Elke and I headed that way with camera and tripod in tow.
My daughter went along too, playing her video game on the drive at first, but losing interest in it when a glow of a more fascinating kind pulsated almost ceaselessly across the southeastern sky. A few “Whoa’s” and “Oooohs” later, she was fully attentive to this grand performance of pyrotechnics in the sky, even uttering a low “Wow!” at a particularly bright cloud-to-air strike that I sorely wish I could have gotten in a photo. That temporary disappointment turned to enjoyment in short order.
What pure fun! For nearly half an hour, until the wind picked up again, we marveled at the spectacle of the strobing and flashing going on a few counties away, visible both directly and in reflections off the strangely calm lake surface.
Clearly this was a very dynamic situation with strong wind fields throughout the great majority of the troposphere, but why was the water so tranquil? Nighttime water reflections of well-organized thunderstorms are hard to get in central Oklahoma, thanks to the inherently blustery nature of the surface winds that accompany weather systems responsible for such convection.
For these beautiful reflections, we could thank a small cluster of showers that moved over the area shortly before we left. After dark, the dryline backed northwestward across central Oklahoma from the area where it had mixed to during the day. Although the low level air around us generally was getting more moist as a result, the dew points still were low enough that the showers evaporatively cooled the air, creating a shallow stable layer of outflow air near the surface. In fact, we even drove through a little ground fog in a couple of low spots, between the house and the lake.
That stable layer mixed away within an hour or so amidst the prevailing, much larger field of moist southerlies that was sweeping back into the area; but in the lower elevations around the lake, it lingered just a little longer.
After midnight, a band of cold frontal thunderstorms moved across central and northern Oklahoma, mainly to our N, its tail end brushing by with light rain, a few nearby lightning strikes and several good, loud peals of thunder.
Not too shabby for January…
===== Roger =====