The fury of the weather on the plains will continue to amaze me as long as I live here. My mother was so concerned with the recent weather reports that she called to make sure I wasn’t a victim of the carnage. Living in tornado alley you learn to live in the path of fury without much concern, except for those few rare days when the sky’s sublime power is revealed.
Last week we had an early taste of the type of summer we can expect. A violent spring storm front moved over Missouri spawning 109 sighted tornados which took nine lives and caused millions of dollars of damage. A dangerous formation of warm and cold fronts collided in a shearing motion which fired up large violent thunderheads. As was the case last week the fronts became stationary and the storms fired up in the same pattern sending a continuous freight train of storms over the same area for hours.
I was fortunate that this particular night I was slightly north of the storm line and was able to stand on the deck to watch the display. Extremely violent storms that spawn such damage are deceiving calm as they approach. As the storms moved to the east, the air stood still without a trace of a breeze. It was as if all the energy was stolen and captured in the top of the fierce anvil. All nature knew what was about to happen. You could not hear a bird or an insect in the encompassing silence. The sky changed color from a milky white to an aquamarine green blue as the air became heavy.
The intense flashes of light without sound is what you first notice sitting in the house. The most intense thunderheads are almost continuously lit with sheet lightening. It sometimes appears to be the firing of thousands of synapses in a huge excited brain. As I watched the storms creep by I was humbled by the intensity of the intra-cloud lightening.
Intra-cloud lightning is the most common type of discharge. This occurs between oppositely charged centers within the same cloud. Usually the process takes place within the cloud and looks from the outside of the cloud like a diffuse brightening which flickers. However, the flash may exit the boundary of the cloud and a bright channel, similar to a cloud-to-ground flash, can be visible for many miles.
The ratio of cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud lightning can vary significantly from storm to storm. Storms with the greatest vertical development may produce intra-cloud lightning almost exclusively. Some suggest that the variations are latitude-dependent, with a greater percentage of cloud-to-ground strikes occurring at higher latitudes. Others suggest that cloud-top height is a more important variable than latitude.
What was so unusual about the storms was the frequency and intensity of lightening exiting the cloud bottoms and radiating out parallel to the ground in a spider web appearance. You could watch the sheet lightening start at the top of the anvil and flash down through the clouds then exit in a point out the bottom of the formation and shoot directly over head into the next cloud without a sound. Only two or three seconds separated each brilliant radiating flash of six to eight bolts. It was a mesmerizing slight even for someone who has watched these storms for thirty years.
Watching the storms silently roll past I thought of the civil war. Yeah I know it’s a strange connection, but I could help but think it was probably the same sense of dread rural folk felt during the civil war. Watching the great army of the Potomac march by in silence with miles of cannons and caissons, an awesome destructive power intent in a distance objective. You could feel that at somewhere in the near future total devastation would be unleashed. Unable to change what was going to happen, I quietly watched as this behemoth power march past.
Lost in my thoughts, I noticed a brilliant white cloud moving quickly toward me so low that it was scrapping the tree tops. It was much different than the other clouds moving in the opposite direction. As it passed in the still air, hail began falling from the sky. For those unfamiliar with these types of storms, this is the best time to retreat to shelter. The news reports indicated baseball size hail was approaching. Only once in thirty years have I seen baseball size hail. Let me tell you it was one of the most deadly destructive things I’ve ever witnessed. In less than three minutes it totaled my two cars and the roof of my house.
The hail storm lasted for about ten minutes and never got any larger than quarter sized. I walked outside to pick up and examine a few of the largest hail pieces. They were beautiful, looking like white tiger eye agates. The center was a perfectly round white core the size of a pea. This center was surrounded by a thick round teardrop of clear ice about a quarter of an inch thick. On the outside of the hailstone was another thick white frosting that had the appearance of an eye lid.
As I marveled at the incredible beauty of the hailstones, I noticed a huge white mass under a shrub in the darkness. Could it be one of those elusive baseball sized hailstones? In my excitement I dropped my handful of white tiger agates and ran to the dark corner of the yard to retrieve this rare find. It seemed so unusual that only one huge hailstone would fall. As I picked up the white mass I discovered that it was in fact a baseball the dogs play with. Embarrassed I looked around half expecting to find the two dogs rolling on the ground laughing at their practical joke.
A few days later I was at the University of Kansas campus which had almost eight million dollars of damage from the storms. Over sixty percent of the buildings on the seven hundred acre campus suffered damage. I was most amazed by the damage to the athletic facilities. The large aluminum bleaches that seat 1500 was picked up tossed over a six foot chain link fence. This is a metal structure that is 100 feet long and has about twenty rows of seats. It appeared that one end of the structure lifted into the air like the tail of a kite. The structure was relocated almost fifty feet away at a 45 degree angle. The metal structure was crumbed like paper. I cannot begin to imagine this structure weighing tons floating ten feet in the air. It was just another unfortunate object in the path of fury.
