Turbulent Tuesday : Wild Weather Day

Today started out as a beautiful, if a bit breezy day. I had lunch outside at a picnic table at work and if it had been a bit less windy, I would have been awfully tempted to go grab a boat, paddle and life jacket and go play "hooky". We even had the doors open at work to let the breeze flow through it was nice.

Until about 4 o'clock.

One of my co-workers was looking out the back door and said, "We're gonna get whacked."

Huh?

I got up from my desk and went to see what was making him say that. There was a band of dark black clouds in the direction that the weather normally comes from. It was the kind of cloud that is the harbinger of a squall. Another co-worker was standing at the front door and said, "Wow. Look at that." Dark clouds of brown dirt from off local farm fields were airborne along with bits of leaves and other light debris. At this point the wind speed probably doubled and the rain began. The temperature also probably dropped about twenty degrees in the mount of time that it takes to read this paragraph. The lights flickered and went out and thunder could be heard. Co-workers were also commenting about the rather ominous rotation that was plainly visible in the clouds to the south.

We waited for the lights to come back on and they flickered hopefully and went out again. About 10 minutes before the end of the day, the power came on for a few minutes - enough for me to almost reboot my computer before the power went off again and I decided to call it a day.

The ride home wasn't uneventful - power was out in a very large area and stoplights weren't working leading to snarled traffic. Several very large trees, including one about 2' in diameter were fallen, as were many large limbs. Large clumps of leaves were tangled up in the insulators of power lines that were far, far away from any trees. If it wasn't a tornado, I'd be amazed.

Here's a picture of the "back" of this front about an hour after the events at work started:


As you can see, as quickly as the front arrived, it was gone. When I got home, it was a beautiful and sunny, but cool evening.

Another take with more pictures from Da Goof.