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
Wonderful pictures! Scary reality!