Monday, August 18, 2008

Socorro weather

We had some crazy weather in Socorro this weekend. Saturday (8/16/08) a storm suddenly popped up over Socorro and dumped lots of rain and small hail for 15 or 20 minutes, then was over.This is a picture of the rain at its worst. Aperently it dumped even worse in the north end of town.
This is a picture of the road by my apartment, it had become a river.
This picture is a bit blury because I took it while driving. This is the NMT golf course, and it is flooded and covered in small hail. The mist from the hail made it look really eerie.
This is the arroyo that I have to cross to get to work. The water had already started dropping when I got there.
Another picture of the arroyo, you can see the high water mark/debries by the arrow.
The is one of the holding ponds for runoff. It ended up completely full, and the road running along the left side was closed because it was flooded so bad (you can see the police cars blocking the road).
This is the road in by my apartment after the water had dropped, along with the new gravel bar (there were lots of these along the road) Some of the rocks were as big as a fist.

These next pictures are from the next day (Sunday 8/17/2008), and these storms were a lot meaner.
This storm had a tornado warning with it, and radar was showing a tornado vortex signature. I had thought it was to far away to see, but when I went outside I could see the storm towering to the north. I glimpsed some low hanging clouds below the storm so I jumped into my truck and drove up the nearest hill for a better view. When I stopped I saw this cloud sticking out of the bottom of the storm. Because the storm was so far away I couldn't tell if the clouds were rotating. If they were it was a funnel cloud.
This is a picture of the same storm, but not zoomed in as much. This storm dropped 3/4" hail to the north, and weather underground radar showed a tornado vortex signature for an hour. Not long after I took this picture the storm started to fall apart.
Another picture of the potential funnel cloud.
A possible wall cloud for a storm that moved in behind the one with the tornado warning. This one was almost scary to watch as it moved in. It looked like it was really trying to get strong rotation going, but could never quite succeed.
This is a the same storm as the previous picture, taken as the storm was moving out of Socorro. It is stitched together form three picture, and doesn't do the storm justice. The right side of the storm was really chaotic. Here is a sped up movie of this storm taken by someone else.
Just another picture of the right side of that storm as the sun was starting to set.

2 Comments:

Blogger BillyCheese said...

That looks like it was a pretty big storm. That is a lot of rain coming down in the first picture. The clouds look large, white and puffy. Those monsoons must be really nasty stuff. I was in a storm in the Uintahs that was probably pretty impressive but not as impressive as that storm.

4:35 PM  
Blogger Harles said...

Now if only the rain would spread out a bit....

4:16 PM  

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