Cloud Production and Pillars of Light

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What an interesting wx day this turned out to be, following a winter storm and a not so interesting chase in se KS Friday. The first oddity was the production of "clouds" by our Cargill plant in town. Usually the steam will just go up and evaporate fairly quickly, not really spreading out at all. I have never seen it do what follows here, ever. The conditions had to be just right for this to take place. There was plenty of moisture in the air with10 fresh inches of snow on the ground. There was wall to wall sunshine under the high pressure with a very light breeze.

The chase started as I looked out the window in my apt and said, "what on earth is that!?" I knew it was supposed to be wall to wall sunshine following this storm, so these clouds weren't making much sense. I'm about 1.5 mi from the plant here on my way there, looking south.

I've never seen this in the past 8 years, not even close.

Another chaser told me it looked like a multi-vortex tornado. It surely does. Nice little egg beater action going on underneath.

I drove around the highway a bit. The surface winds were very light out of the nne. There really were no sfc winds to speak of actually.

Winds just off the sfc were se, still very lightly. I can't believe I didn't think of doing time lapse of this. This streamed nw for miles.

Up on a hill here.

Stationary supercell with overshooting top?

Pillars of Light

The only time I've seen these was while watching the movie Poltergeists! Every light in this area had beams shooting straight up into the sky. This was a tad freaky driving around in.

These are not camera artifacts. The little dots in the above pic are, but the beams are not. The cold air(-1) was surpressing that same steam as pictured above, or at least it seemed to. Well the steam was now air born ice crystals.

Not sure how exactly it works but light sources were focused straight up, some in 4 directions.

These brighter ones were going 4 directions. If you drove up to them you could see the ice flakes passing through the beam-kind of like dust in your house while the sun is shining in the windown.

What sucks about this is that there wasn't one cool thing to take a pics of in this entire area. There were just a bunch of construction buildings and storage sheds, with lots of fences and power poles to go with.

I did not drive down this road, it was just too spooky(I'm kidding).

The moisture source. This is looking south on top of the bridge.

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The chase started as I looked out the window in my apt and said, "what on earth is that!?" I knew it was supposed to be wall to wall sunshine following this storm, so these clouds weren't making much sense. I'm about 1.5 mi from the plant here on my way there, looking south.
I've never seen this in the past 8 years, not even close.
Another chaser told me it looked like a multi-vortex tornado. It surely does. Nice little egg beater action going on underneath.
I drove around the highway a bit. The surface winds were very light out of the nne. There really were no sfc winds to speak of actually.
Winds just off the sfc were se, still very lightly. I can't believe I didn't think of doing time lapse of this. This streamed nw for miles.
Up on a hill here.
Stationary supercell with overshooting top?

The only time I've seen these was while watching the movie Poltergeists! Every light in this area had beams shooting straight up into the sky. This was a tad freaky driving around in.
These are not camera artifacts. The little dots in the above pic are, but the beams are not. The cold air(-1) was surpressing that same steam as pictured above, or at least it seemed to. Well the steam was now air born ice crystals.
Not sure how exactly it works but light sources were focused straight up, some in 4 directions.
These brighter ones were going 4 directions. If you drove up to them you could see the ice flakes passing through the beam-kind of like dust in your house while the sun is shining in the windown.
What sucks about this is that there wasn't one cool thing to take a pics of in this entire area. There were just a bunch of construction buildings and storage sheds, with lots of fences and power poles to go with.
I did not drive down this road, it was just too spooky(I'm kidding).
The moisture source. This is looking south on top of the bridge.