Striking, powerful image.
Wow. ![]()
–James
That picture is a poem of many, many, words.
It’s a breathtaking image. I keep going back and staring at it. The kind of shot you dream about getting–and yet you could never imagine that exact event. Great photo.
Wow! I was thinking “What a pretty farm! So green! I’d love to live somewhere like that! Get away from the hurricanes!”
Absolutely.
That image brings to mind the many times I have run across these things while driving around the country from gig to gig. Very cool image.
Aunty Em! Aunty Em!
I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Give ME the Ruby Slippers!
I’ll fix YOU, my pretty, and your little DOG, too!
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djm
… there’s no place like home, there’s no place like…
There are some distinct advantages to tornadoes over hurricanes. For one, you only have about two minutes warning, so you don’t have to go shop for water and batteries at the last minute. Second, they are only about [hyperbole on] ten feet wide[\hyperbole], so their path is very small compared to a hurricane. Third, they only last a few minutes, so you don’t have to cower in the basement all day. And fourth, no matter what impression you get from the news, your odds of actually seeing one, let alone being in one, are quite low. I’ve lived in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas (all prime tornado states) all my life, and I’ve only seen one.
(I could probably get into trouble for telling you number 4, because we like to keep the rest of the country laboring under the misapprehension thay are a daily occurence. We really don’t want a bunch of Californians moving here and driving up the property values and insurance rates and generally ruining the place like they did to Colorado and Montana. That’s why we elect morons to the school board, too.)
The other State Motto of Kansas:
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I read somewhere - probably New Scientist - that the country with the most tornadoes/twisters was [improbability]The UK.[/improbability]
But they are mostly pretty small, so no-one much notices them. Things are always bigger in the U.S. (well… ..some things, anyway.)
I didn’t realise this was the APOD! Where did the stars go?
Oh - forgive me. They’re over the rainbow. Of course.
We have tornadoes here, too.
Every afternoon from May to November, we have huge thunderstorms that brew out of a combination of intense heat and high humidity. They travel cross-country at alarming rates, spawning tornadoes the whole way.
The rest of the time, we just have thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Look here. All the hideous yellow blotches are horrible storms. I can see them stacked up around the horizon as we speak.
See all that stuff southeast of Bradenton? It’s all going to roll right over me in an hour, and by then it’ll be red and purple.
And there’s thunder coming from north of me right now. It’s hardly showing up on the radar.
Why, oh why, do I have to live here???

This is how we’re looking right about now. I’m approximately where the pink blobby dot above the “P” in Pittsburgh is

Edited to add that for now the storms seem to be just north and just south of us. They are predicting storms that are supposed to hit us this evening, though.
A couple of weeks ago, this is what we were dealing with (and yes, we did end up getting hit with quite a bit of it):

These systems that keep coming through are really getting old. ![]()
dippy jet stream! ![]()
As I do not wish to outdone by you Merkins, I’m posting this pic that I took about an hour ago in my back garden. I pressed the shutter fruitlessly about 100 times before I finally timed it right! ![]()
I can see a silhoutte of the leaves. What type of fruit are they? ![]()
(actually, that’s a way cool pic Steve) ![]()
djm
That’s pretty.
They’re elm leaves. Had I trimmed 'em today as I’d intended I’d have got the flash all the way down to the Atlantic (that you can just make out).
That one bit of cloud that the lightning bolt is coming out of looks like the beginnings of a funnel
Hope it didn’t get too wild over your way, Steve!
Oh, and it is a great picture ![]()
And fourth, no matter what impression you get from the news, your odds of actually seeing one, let alone being in one, are quite low. I’ve lived in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas (all prime tornado states) all my life, and I’ve only seen one.
I’ve lived in Oklahoma all of my life, save for about five years, and never seen one.

