Geeking Out

I'm not a classic weather geek. I kind of stumbled in to the field as means of being involved in operations and a pathway into Special Tactics when the Air Force was trying to force me to be an Engineer. Not an engineer that made things, but a guy with an engineering degree who oversaw purchase programs from people who did make things.

Operations has always been the appeal. The science is interesting, don't get me wrong, but it is mostly a means to an end for me. I don't have a rain gauge at home and (unlike more than a few fellow weather troops, even SOWT guys) I've never spent a summer chasing tornados. Or even thought about. Though I admit that, while nothing like the movie Twister, it's a respectable way to let the inner geek out.

Me... my inner geek came out watching satellite imagery of a outflow from thunderstorms over the desert and then watching the interaction of the dust from different sources as they converged on each other.

An outflow is the flow of wind from a collapsing cloud. It is one of nature's great examples of what went up coming back down. Especially over the desert, when a storm either exhausts itself or the different atmospheric conditions that support its growth are no longer all present, this incredible force of nature becomes quite fragile. It behaves much like an imploding skyscraper.

And if you've ever seen footage of an imploding building, you see all the air compressed by the falling mass suddenly pushed outward in all directions. When this happens over a dry desert, and the falling building is actually tens of thousands of feet of cloud airbursting overhead... well, it kicks up a lot of dust.

It just so happens that there was a low pressure center at the surface and some of the dust got caught up in the great counterclock wise circulation of the air. As ti the low moved to the northeast, the dust circulation was warped into a classic comma shape. It was like a wind tunnel experiement using Iraqi dust instead of colored smoke to demonstrate how the atmosphere works.

Where dust from and outflow came crashing into the dust around the low in a grand head-on collision, it was all forced upward like mountains forming where tectonic plates make contact.

The whole thing was so chaotic and so ordered at the same time.

Courtesy of modern technology, I got to watch it in a false color animation that took hours of imagery and played it over the course of seconds. The unnatural hues were strangely beautiful.

Of course, the whole thing is also an incredible pain. There may be an underlying order to these storms, but their predictability is painfully limited.

So it goes.

I was both humbled and awed by the weather today. I guess that's something.