Supercell thunderstorms are a manifestation of nature’s attempt to correct an extreme imbalance. The ingredient based explanation for supercells includes moisture, wind shear, instability and lift. Given the right conditions, this development can be explosive.
Here, just as with the larger scale weather systems, the wedge of denser cool air at the surface meets the warm, moist, buoyant air in front of a storm, forcing it aloft and through the cap where the potential energy is realized. The stunning supercell storm structure we see is along these relatively small, storm-scale cold fronts.
The cool air is more dense than the warm air, and because of this, advances into the region of lower density, just like the larger cold front on which the storm formed. This is effectively a storm’s cold front. Within these smaller storm-scale environments, something called a rear-flank gust front forms on the southern end of the low pressure area of the mesocyclone, where the rain cooled air wraps around. On each scale level from synoptic-scale, which covers areas the size of multiple states, all the way down to micro-scale, which could be an area as small as your backyard, the fluid which we call air abides by the same universal physical laws of nature and thus acts in a very similar manner and patterns.Ī cold front, for example, is a phenomenon which is widely understood to mean a large scale line of advancing cold air, hundreds of miles long, along which supercell thunderstorms sometimes form. This quote sums up perfectly what I’ve come to realize about weather and storms over the past 10 years of studying, forecasting and chasing them, and the part that I find most fascinating. “Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity.” – Meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson (“Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.” Cambrige University Press, 1922) In this beautiful montage of moving images collected over ten years, director Chad Cowan and composer Arvo Pärt capture the drama and poetry of weather.
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