Location Taken: Near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010
I’ve stated before how much I love clouds in the prairies, but even more than that I love storms. And storms in the prairies are beyond marvelous. I know there’s a lot of people who think the people who choose to live in, say, Kansas or South Dakota or Manitoba must be boring, to choose such a boring flat land as their home, but those people have no clue of the beauty of the sky.
In more populated areas, or heavily mountainous, sure, the clouds are pretty, but they’re hidden behind the local landscape, and hazed out by pollution and humidity. If you’re lucky enough to find one of the rare spots where you can actually see to the horizon without a tree or mountain or building getting in the way, the distant clouds are blurred away anyway.
But in the clear air of the prairies and plains of the central North American continent, the air is clear and so are the sightlines. And you can literally watch storms grow in the distance. And my goodness, are the storms impressive.
There’s a reason for that, and it all has to do with geography. Strong storms form when there is an imbalance in the air, whether from temperature or humidity. The air will then try to equalize this imbalance, causing great motions in the air known better as wind. And as the air gets disturbed, clouds form, and rain may form. And if the imbalance is great enough, especially if cool air ends up on top of warm air (the opposite of the way they want to be), thunderstorms form, and grow to impressive heights and strengths.
And the great plains commonly have such imbalances. Cool dry air comes down from Canada, the humidity pulled out of it from passing over mountain range after mountain range, and it hits the warm wet air slowly working its way up from the Gulf of Mexico. And the cool air, moving both quicker than the warm air and coming from greater heights, will often find itself above the warm air. And the storms form. It’s why this part of the US is the most tornado-prone region in the world, and bears the nickname Tornado Alley.
Even when there’s no tornadoes with a thunderstorm, the storms themselves are large and impressive. And with the sightlines of the area, you can see all of it. It’s no wonder storm chasing started in the US, and is still most common in Tornado Alley. It may be dangerous, it may be expensive (just think of all the gas required!), and many people will think you’re a bit cracked, but oh the storms!
…I may have frequent inclinations towards storm chasing myself, if you haven’t noticed…
