USA 2017 storm season

[Nev]

This loop is what a wet microburst looks like when it dropped directly over the Doppler radar at El Paso, Texas on Wednesday local time...

July 26
This afternoon a "WET MICROBURST" dropped out of a thunderstorm and landed directly over our office (the El Paso Area National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office) and our EPZ doppler weather radar. You are looking at a loop of the doppler radar. In this loop we are showing velocities that the radar detected. Red indicates air moving AWAY from the radar...green is air moving toward the radar...ignore the purple.

A microburst is a mass of cool, wet, heavy air that falls out of some thunderstorms. As this wad of air reaches the earth's surface it lands like a water balloon with intense rainfall and very strong winds. Strong, cool, moist wind rushes out away from ground zero, in all directions, at high rates. These are relatively common, but capturing one directly over a weather radar is not. That makes tonight's occurrence a rare event. With this microburst we received 1.16" [29mm] of rainfall in about 30 min, and experienced 73 mph [117 km/h] winds. That wind gust made this a severe thunderstorm.

[NZstorm]

GFS sounding for that El Paso microurst,

Looks like tropical thunder shower with a lot of dry air under the base of the storm. Evaporational cooling is one of the concepts of microbursts as is precipitation loading all being released at once. So maybe a combination of the two.

[Nev]

Mod note:
Have moved a few recent posts about the Forum USA Trip 2018 to the 'Forum USA Trip 2018' thread.

[tgsnoopy]

Hank does it again

[Rogue]

Forgot to share my 2017 timelapse video here on the forum!

[NZstorm]

Awesome clip Rogue. The spectacular thing about USA storms is the motions within them and time laspse is certainly the way to capture that. You saw a lot of supercells in what was regarded by US chasers as a slow year.