Bad Things Happen

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This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection.  That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides:  a cell of convection.  This convective cell is called a supercell and it’s rare but is the worst kind of thunderstorm; the other kinds are single cell and multicells, and they’re bad enough.  Supercells not only have a super-strong updraft, the updraft is rotating.  They can stay formed-up like this for hours and they’re miles across; they’re over-sized, steady-state tornadoes.  They’re mean and ugly and cause havoc.   As it happens, this one didn’t.  It sat in Glasgow, Montana – supercells are most common in the Great Plains – for a while, looking like your worst fear, and then moved on.  I’ll bet it blew out that bushy little tree to the right though.  The photographer has a lot of these pictures and if you’re complacent about nothing bad ever happening to you, you’ll want to look at them.

Photo credit:  used with the kind permission of Sean Heavey

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Categorized in: Ann, LWON, Nature

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