Tornado (Watch) Clouds
Posted on August 19, 2009 Posted by John Scalzi 24 Comments
In case you’re wondering what the sky looks like when the weather radio tells you to consider heading for your basement. Most of these are past us now.
Whatever
FURIOUSLY REASONABLE
WHATEVER
Taunting the tauntable since 1998
John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, contributor – AMS
About the site
The Big Idea
What's the Big Idea? Authors explaining the the big ideas behind their latest works, in their own words. See the latest Big Ideas!
Authors/Editors/Publicists: for information on how to participate, click here.
In Seattle, mind you, the weather almost never tries to kill you.
Translation “seek cover”=”grab camcorder”.
Not faulting you, out here (San Diego) it’s “fire evacuation”=”get on roof with garden hose” and or “find a hill with a good view”.
When they announced the tornado watch this afternoon (here in NE Iowa) and said we were to head to the basement, me and half my crew went outside to watch the skies.
Survival instincts don’t seem to be too strong in us.
Tornado Watch in my county. And some mean woman came to the door trying to take my dog! I’ll show HER. What?!?!? Get Krissy, not tolerent wife Krissy, bat weilding Krissy. More info please.
When I was a kid we had to evacuate for a brush fire. We had 20 horses and one two horse trailer. Eveybody was going to walk out 4 horses at a time and we were still short until a guy on a motorcycle showed up. He abondoned his bike in our driveway to help lead horses. We loaded his motorcycle into our van. The fire was stopped across the street from our house.
That would be an awesome front cover image for a book.
Think i just had a moment..
Stunning clouds
Very nice picture of interesting clouds. Glad there was no actual tornado.
Waiting for the Death Eaters to start swooping down…
Hey, we had a tornado today, too!
All I got was rain. The tornado was three miles away from me. Not that I’m complaining, mind you…
Looks like a wanna be mesocyclone there. Good that it stayed “wanna be”.
That sky looks positively Gustave Dore-esque.
Tornados have always terrified me. And I am no chickenshit. But the thought of some destructive finger of God crashing its way across the countryside under the cover of dark clouds, freight train winds and horizontal rain chilled my soul.
I’ve only seen clouds like that once (being a coastal resident my whole life), but I didn’t know what they were, so I drove along with my head out the window looking at the clouds. When I got to the university campus I was going to, all the Easterners there for the conference were eating dinner in the dining hall right by the two-story tall glass windows, so we could get a good look at the sky. The locals thought we were crazy when in reality we were just ignorant.
Remember, civil defense sirens mean “something interesting is happening outside, you should go look.”
OMG, I think I saw the face of God there!
Oh. Wait. I think it’s just Karl Marx.
Looks like 4pm in Berkeley, just about every day in the summer. It’s just a little bit of fog.
Man, I miss thunderstorms. Out here we get an eensy flash of lightning, and all the “Earthquake? Don’t even bother me unless it’s above 4.0” people are hiding under their beds.
Years ago, I worked in a factory near King’s Island, which is a very flat area that’s less than 30 miles from Xenia, the infamous tornado city from the 1970’s.
One night after shift, we all stood out in the parking lot and watched this enormous thunderhead approach. We all stood there slack-jawed when I decided to break the tension. I said, “Get me a camcorder and the location of the nearest trailer park.”
I barely got out of that parking lot alive.
Oh no. Somebody in Indiana opened that #@$% Ark of the Covenant again.
Eeek!
I’ve got a collection of pictures like that, myself. They’re fun to look at after the fact and go, “Gosh, I probably should have been taking cover…” but each time, I’m out there with my camera.
(One time, it looked like that scene in ST: Generations, when Soren was standing waiting for the Nexxus strand to take him. Another time, it looked like the Ghostbusters were needed over at the Auxiliary Library Facility.)
Basement? What’s that?
Maybe one home in 100 has a basement out here.
I wish I had a basement.
That there is “rift in dimensional space” weather. It’s like the tentacle of an elder god is about to come reaching on out. Man, I miss mid-western skies.
For the list: Hurricane Watch = Party to use up everything in the freezer OR Go to Costco, gotta get lots more beer.
Wow.